DISCOURSE

ANALYSIS


A resource book for students




RODNEY H. JONES





















(103,884 words)

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HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The Routledge English Language Introductions are flexi-texts that you can use
to suit your own style of study. The books are divided into four sections: A
Introduction sets out the key concepts for the area of study. The units of this
section take you through the foundational concepts, providing you with an initial
toolkit for your own study. By the end of the section, you will have a good
overview of the whole field. B Development adds to your knowledge and builds
on the key ideas already introduced. Units in this section also introduce key
analytical tools and techniques. By the end of this section, you will already have a
good and fairly detailed grasp of the field, and will be ready to undertake your
own exploration and thinking. C Exploration provides examples of language
data and guides you through your own investigation of the topic or area. The
units in this section will be more open-ended and exploratory, and you will be
encouraged to try out your ideas and think for yourself, using your newly
acquired knowledge. D Extension offers you the chance to compare your
expertise with key readings in the area. These are taken from the work of
important writers, and are provided with guidance and questions for your
further thought. You can read this book like a traditional textbook, vertically
straight through from beginning to end. So you would establish a broad sense of
the key ideas by reading through section A, and deepen your knowledge by
reading section B. Section C would then present you with one or more Activities
to test out different aspects of your broad knowledge. Finally, having gained a
good level of competence, you can read the section D articles and follow up the
Further Reading. However, the Routledge English Language Introductions have
been designed so that you can read them in another dimension, horizontally
across the numbered units. For example, units A1, B1, C1 and D1 constitute a
strand, then developing your knowledge, then testing out and exploring some
key ideas, and finally offering you a key case-study to read. The strand across A2,
B2, C2, D2, and the other strands 3, 4, 5, and so on, all work in the same way.
Reading across the strands will take you rapidly from the key concepts of a
specific topic, to a level of expertise in that precise topic, all with a very close
focus. You can match your way of reading with the best way that you work. The
glossarial index at the end, together with the suggestions for Further Reading for
each strand will help to keep you orientated. Each textbook has a supporting
website with extra commentary, suggestions, additional material and support for
teachers and students.

This book covers the vast field of the Discourse Analysis. Strand 1 gives a general
introduction to the field, and the following strands are broadly arranged across
three areas. Strands 1 to 4 cover the study of written discourse, examining TM
cohesion and coherence, the social functions of texts and the ways ideology is
expressed in written texts. Strands 5 to 7 focus more on spoken discourse and
more interactive written discourse such as that which occurs in computer-

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mediated communication, examining how conversations are structured and how
conversational participations strategically construct identities and activities in
their talk, as well as how social contexts affect the way utterances are produced

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 and interpreted. The last three strands focus on three relatively new approaches
to discourse: mediated discourse analysis, an approach which examines, among
other things, the way media affect the kinds of discourse we can produce and
what we can do with it; multimodal discourse analysis, an approach which
considers modes of communication beyond spoken and written language such as
images and gestures; and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, an approach which
uses computers to aid in the analysis of large collections of texts or transcripts.
Discourse analysis is a diverse and rapidly developing field: nearly everything
observation we have made about discourse in this book is open to debate, and
nearly every analytical technique we have introduced is open to criticism or
further refinement. The real aim of this book is to provide you with the basic
backgroud to be able to engage in these debates and to assemble a toolkit of
analytical techniques that best fit your needs. If you wish to know more about
the ways discourse analysis fits into or relates to other approaches to the study
of English, other books in the RELI series such as Introducing English language: A
resource book for students by Louise Mullany and Peter Stockwell, Pragmatics
and discourse: A resource book for students by Joan Cutting, and Language and
power: A resource book for students by Paul Simpson and Andrea Mayr.

The RELI books do not aim to replace your teacher or lecturer, but instead they
offer both student and expert a resource for you to adapt as you think most
appropriate. You will want to take issue with what is presented here, test out the
assumptions, and we hope feel motivated to read and explore further. Space
is always space for tutors to mediate the material and for students to explore
beyond the book.

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 CONTENTS

Contents cross-referenced
List of figures and tables
Acknowledgements

A Introduction: Key topics in the study of discourse analysis

1 What is discourse analysis?
2 Texts and texture
3 Texts and their social functions
4 Discourse and ideology
5 Spoken discourse
6 Strategic Interaction
7 Context, culture and communication
8 Mediated discourse analysis
9 Multimodal discourse analysis
10 Corpus-assisted discourse analysis

B Development: Approaches to discourse analysis

1 Three ways of looking at discourse
2 Cohesion and coherence
3 All the right moves
4 Constructing reality
5 The texture of talk
6 Negotiating relationships and activities
7 The SPEAKING model
8 Mediation
9 Modes, meaning and action
10 Procedures for corpus-assisted discourse analysis

C Exploration: Analyzing discourse

1 Doing discourse analysis: first steps
2 Analyzing texture
3 Analyzing genres
4 Other peoples voices
5 Analyzing speech acts
6 Analyzing conversational strategies
7 Analyzing contexts
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8 Doing mediated discourse analysis
9 Doing multimodal discourse analysis
10 Analyzing corpora

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 D Extension: Readings in discourse analysis

1 The three perspectives revisited (Zellig Harris; Henry G. Widdowson;
James Paul Gee)
2 Two perspectives on texture (Michael A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan;
David Rumelhart)
3 Genres, discourse communities and power (John Swales, Vijay K. Bhatia)
4 Ideologies in discourse (Norman Fairclough; James Paul Gee)
5 Two perspectives on conversation (John L. Austin; Emanuel A. Schegloff
and Harvey Sacks)
6 Frames in interaction (Deborah Tannen and Cynthia Wallat)
7 The ethnography of communication (Dell Hymes; Muriel Saville-Troike)
8 Discourse and action (Ron Scollon)
9 Two perspectives on multimodality (Gunther Kress, and Theo van
Leeuwen; Sigrid Norris)
10 Finding Discourses with corpus-assisted analysis (Paul Baker, and Tony
McEnery)

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CONTENTS CROSS-REFERENCED

Topic A INTRODUCTION B DEVELOPMENT C EXPLORATION E EXTENSION Topic
1 What is discourse analysis? Three ways of looking at discourse Doing discourse analysis: first The three perspectives revisited 1
steps (Zellig Harris; Henry G.
Widdowson; James Paul Gee)
2 Texts and texture Cohesion and coherence Analyzing texture Two perspectives on texture 2
(Michael A. K. Halliday and
Ruqaiya Hasan; David
Rumelhart)
3 Texts and their social functions All the right moves Analyzing genres Genres, discourse communities 3
and power (John Swales, Vijay
K. Bhatia)
4 Discourse and ideology Constructing reality Other peoples voices Ideologies in discourse (Norman 4
Fairclough; James Paul Gee)
5 Spoken discourse The texture of talk Analyzing speech acts Two perspectives on 5
conversation (John L. Austin;
Emanuel A. Schegloff and
Harvey Sacks)
6 Strategic interaction Negotiating relationships and Analyzing conversational Frames in interaction (Deborah 6
activities strategies Tannen and Cynthia Wallat)
7 Context, culture and The SPEAKING model Analyzing contexts The ethnography of 7
communication communication (Dell Hymes;
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Muriel Saville-Troike)
8 Mediated discourse analysis Mediation Doing mediated discourse Discourse and action (Ron 8
analysis Scollon)
9 Multimodal discourse analysis Modes, meaning and action Doing multimodal discourse Two perspectives on 9
analysis multimodality (Gunther Kress,

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and Theo van Leeuwen; Sigrid
Norris)
10 Corpus-assisted discourse Procedures for corpus-assisted Analyzing corpora Finding Discourses with 10
analysis discourses analysis corpus-assisted analysis (Paul
Baker, and Tony McEnery)

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 LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

A5.1 Calvin and Hobbs (Universal Press Syndicate All Rights Reserved)
B2.1 Advertisement from Body Coach.Net
B8.1 Crossing the street
B9.1 Warriors (photo credit Claudio Gennari)
B9.2 Using information, media and digital literacy (credit Karin Dalziel)
B9.3 Child (photo credit Denis Mihailov)
B9. 4 AIDS prevention advertisement (Abrasco, Brazil)
B10.1 Concordance plots for Lady Gaga songs
C1.1 Excerpt from the authors Facebook News Feed
C3.1 From The Daily Dish
C3.2 From Dont Make Me Mad (Cheryn-ann Chews blog)
C6.1 Excerpt from the authors Facebook Wall
C6.2 MSN Messenger emoticons
C10.1 Partial concordance list for me
C10.2 Partial concordance list for me
C10.3 Keywords in the Lady Gaga corpus

Tables

B6.1 Face strategies
C4.1 Different forms of discourse representation
C5.1 Comparison of threatening, warning, advising and promising (adapted
from Shuy 1993: 98)
C8.1 Cultural tools for breaking up
C10.1 Size of corpora and type token ratio

C10.2 Top five function words
C10.3 Top five content words
C10.4 Top 5 collocates of love (span 5L, 5R)

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank all of my colleagues at City University of Hong Kong for their
valuable suggestions and support while I was writing this book, and especially
my students with whom I have tried out this material over the years and who
have given me valuable feedback on it. Particular thanks go to Mr Daniel
Freeman for his close copyediting and insightful comments on the manuscript.

The author and publisher also wish to thank the following for permission to use
copyright material.

MCA Music, Kiss the Bride, Elton John (1983) (A4)
United Press Syndicate for Calvin and Hobbs (Image ID 17467) released
12/27/1985. All rights reserved (A5)
Body Coach International, Advertisement. All rights reserved (B2)
Castle Rock Pictures, excerpt from script of When Harry Met Sally (1988) B6
Claudio Gennari, Warriors (photo) licensed under the Creative Commons for
reuse with attribution. (B9)
Karin Dalziel, Using information, media and digital literacy, image, licensed
under the Creative Commons for reuse with attribution. (B9)
Denis Mihailov, Child (photo), licensed under the Creative Commons for reuse
with attribution. (B9)
Starbucks Corporation, text from coffee sleeve (C1)
Press Trust of India, Lady Gaga's 'meat dress' voted most iconic outfit
Dec 19, 2010, Retreived from The Times of India (C2)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, The PETA Files, Lady Gagas Meat
Dress, September 13, 2010
The Atlantic Corporation, Screenshot from the Daily Dish (C3)
Cheryn-ann Chew, Screenshot from Blog http://calciumblock.diaryland.com/,
used with permission (C3)
China shuns U.S. mediation in its island dispute with Japan , CNN International,
November 03, 2010
China: Trilateral talks merely US wishful thinking, China Daily, November 02,
2010 (C4)
MSN Messenger emoticons. Microsoft Corporation (C6)
Wacoal Butterfly Bra ad, Wacoal Holdings Corporation. All Rights Reserved. (C9)
Harris, Z. (1952). Discourse analysis. Language, 28(1), 1-30. (D1)
Widdowson, H. G. (1973). An applied linguistic approach to discourse analysis.
(Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Department of Linguistics, University of
Edinburgh. (D1)
Gee, J. P. (2010). Introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (3rd ed.).
London: Routledge. (D1) TM
Halliday, M. A. K., and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
(D2)
Rumelhart, D. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In D. Bobrow and A. Collins

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(Eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science. New York:
Academic Press. (B2, D2)
 Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (D3)
Bhatia, V. K. (1997). The power and politics of genre. World Englishes, 16(3), 359-
371. (D3)
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. London: Polity. (D4)
Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. London ;
Bristol, PA: Taylor and Francis. (D4)
Austin, J. L. (1976). How to do things with words, 2nd Edition. (J. O. Urmson, and
M. Sbisa, Eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. (D5)
Schegloff , E. A. and Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 7, 289- 327.
(D5) Hymes, D. (1986). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J.
J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics (pp. 296-336).
Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (D7)
Saville-Troike, M. (2003) The ethnography of communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
(D7)
Scollon, R. (2001). Mediated discourse: The nexus of practice. London: Routledge.
(D8)
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: the grammar of visual
design 2nd Edition. London and New York: Routledge. (D9)
Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing multimodal interaction: a methodological framework.
London: Routledge. (A9)
Baker, P. and McEnery, T. (2005). A corpus-based approach to discourses of
refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts. Journal of Language
and Politics 4(2), 197-226. (D10)

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SECTION A:

INTRODUCTION: KEY TOPICS IN THE
STUDY OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

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 A1 WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ?

Our first step in the study of discourse analysis has to be figuring out exactly
what we mean by discourse and why it is so important to learn how to analyze
it.

To start out we can say that discourse analysis is the study of language. Many
people would define discourse analysis as a sub-field of linguistics, which is the
scientific study of language. Different kinds of linguists study different aspects of
language. Phonologists study the sounds of languages and how people use them.
Lexicographers study words, their meanings and their histories. Grammarians
study how words are put together to form sentences and spoken utterances. And
discourse analysts study the ways sentences and utterances go together to make
texts and interactions and how those texts and interactions fit into our social
world.

But discourse analysis is not just the study of language, but a way of looking at
language that focuses on how people use it in real life to do things like joke and
argue and persuade and flirt, and to show that they are certain kinds of people or
belong to certain groups. This way of looking at language is based on four main
assumptions. They are:

1) Language is ambiguous. What things mean is never absolutely clear. All
communication involves interpreting what other people mean and what they are
trying to do.

2) Language is always in the world. That is, what language means is always a
matter of where and when it is used and what it is used to do.

3) The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the different
social groups to which we belong. We use language to display different kinds of
social identities and to show that we belong to different groups.

4) Language is never used all by itself. It is always combined with other things
such as our tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures when we speak, and the
fonts, layout and graphics we use in written texts. What language means and
what we can do with it is often a matter of how it is combined with these other
things.

The ambiguity of language TM

Everyone has had the experience of puzzling over what someone a lover or a
parent or a friend really meant by what he or she said. In fact, nearly all

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communication contains some elements of meaning that are not expressed
directly by the words that are spoken or written. Even when we think we are
expressing ourselves clearly and directly, we many not be. For example, you may

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 want to borrow a pen from someone, and express this desire with the question,
Do you have a pen? Strictly speaking, though, this question does not directly
communicate that you need a pen. It only asks if the other person is in
possession of one. In order to understand this question as a request, the other
person needs to undertake a process of figuring out what you meant, a process
which in this case may be largely unconscious and automatic, but which is, all the
same, a process of interpretation.

So, we can take as a starting point for our study of discourse analysis the fact that
people dont always say what they mean, and people dont always mean what they
say. This is not because people are trying to trick or deceive each other (though
sometimes they are), but because language is, by its very nature, ambiguous. To
say exactly what we mean all the time would be impossible; first, because as
poets, lovers and even lawyers know, language is an imperfect tool for the
precise expression of many things we think and feel; and second because
whenever we communicate we always mean to communicate more than just one
thing. When you ask your friend if he or she has a pen, for example, you mean to
communicate not just that you need a pen but also that you do not wish to
impose on them or that you feel a bit shy about borrowing a pen, which is one of
the reasons why you approach the whole business of requesting indirectly by
asking if they have a pen, even when you know very well that they have one.

Language in the world

One of the most important ways we understand what people mean when they
communicate is by making reference to the social context within which they are
speaking or writing. The meaning of an utterance can change dramatically
depending on who is saying it, when and where it is said, and to whom it is said.
If a teacher asks a student who is about to take an examination the same
question we discussed above: Do you have a pen? it is rather unlikely that this is
a request or that the teacher is a bit shy about communicating with the student.
Rather, this utterance is probably designed to make sure that the student has the
proper tool to take the examination or to inform the student that a pen (rather
than a pencil) must be used.

In other words, when we speak of discourse, we are always speaking of language
that is in some way situated. Language is always situated in at least four ways.
First, language is situated within the material world, and where we encounter it,
whether it be on a shop sign or in a textbook or on a particular website will
contribute to the way we interpret it. Second, language is situated within
relationships; one of the main ways we understand what people mean when they
speak or write is by referring to who they are, how well we know them, and TM
whether or not they have some kind of power over us. Third, language is situated
in history, that is, in relation to what happened before and what we expect to
happen afterwards. Finally, language is situated in relation to other language

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utterances and texts always respond to or refer to other utterances and texts;
that is, everything that we say or write is situated in a kind of network of
discourse.

Language and social identity

Not only is discourse situated, partly by who says (or writes) what to whom, but
people -- the whos and the whoms who say or write these things -- are also
situated by discourse. What is meant by this is that whenever people speak or
write, they are, through their discourse, somehow demonstrating who they are
and what their relationship is to other people. They are enacting their identities.

The important thing about such identities is that they are multiple and fluid
rather than singular and fixed. The identity I enact at the dance club on Friday
night is not the same identity I enact at the office on Monday morning. The
reason for this is not that I change my personality in any fundamental way, but
rather that I change the way I use language.

Language and other modes

Changing the way I use language when I enact the identity of a dance club diva or
a yoga teacher or a university professor, of course, is not enough to fully enact
these identities. I also have to dress in certain ways, act in certain ways, and hang
out in certain places with certain people. In other words, language alone cannot
achieve all the things I need to do to be a certain kind of person. I always have to
combine that language with other things like fashion, gestures, and the handling
of various kinds of objects.

Partially because of its roots in linguistics, discourse analysts used to focus
almost exclusively on written or spoken language. Now, people are increasingly
realizing not just that we communicate in a lot of ways that do not involve
language, but that in order to understand what people mean when they use
language, we need to pay attention to the way it is combined with these other
communicative modes.

So What Good is Discourse Analysis?

Given these four principles, we can begin to understand some of the reasons why
learning how to analyze discourse might be useful. The chief reason is that we
already engage in discourse analysis all the time when we try to figure out what
people mean by what they say and when we try to express our multiple and
complicated meanings to them. Much of what you learn in this book will be about
making processes that already take place beneath the surface of your
consciousness more explicit. But what is the point of that, you might ask, if TM all of
this communication and interpretation is going on so smoothly without us
having to attend to it? The fact is, however, it is not. None of us is immune to

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misunderstandings, to offending people by saying the wrong thing, to struggling
to get our message across, or to being taken in by someone who is trying
somehow to cheat us. Hopefully, by understanding how discourse works we will
be able to understand people better and communicate more effectively.

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Studying discourse analysis, however, can teach you more than that. Since the
way we use discourse is tied up with our social identities and our social
relationships, discourse analysis can help us to understand how the societies in
which we live are put together and how they are maintained through our day to
day activities of speaking, writing and making use of other modes of
communication. It can help us to understand why people interact with one
another the way they do and how they exert power and influence over one
another. It can help us to understand how people view reality differently and
why they view it that way. The study of discourse analysis, then, is not just the
study of how we use language. It is also indirectly the study of romance,
friendship, psychology, politics, power, and a whole lot of other things.

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 A2 TEXTS AND TEXTURE

Discourse analysts analyze texts and conversations. But what is a text and
what is a conversation? What distinguishes texts and conversations from
random collections of sentences and utterances? These are the questions we will
take up in this section. For now we will mostly be considering written texts.
Later we will talk more about conversations.

Consider the following list of words:

Milk
Spaghetti
Tomatoes
Rocket
Light bulbs

You might look at this list and conclude that this is not a text for the simple
reason that it makes no sense to you that it has no meaning. According to the
linguist M.A.K. Halliday, meaning is the most important thing that makes a text a
text; it has to make sense. A text, in his view, is everything that is meaningful in a
particular situation. And the basis for meaning is choice (Halliday 1978: 137).
Whenever I choose one thing rather than another from a set of alternatives (yes
or no, up or down, red or blue), I am making meaning. This focus on meaning, in
fact, is one of the main things that distinguishes Hallidays brand of linguistics
from that of other linguists who are concerned chiefly with linguistic forms.
Historically, the study of linguistics, he points out (1994: xiv), first involved
studying the way the language was put together (syntax and morphology)
followed by the study of meaning. In his view, however, the reverse approach is
more useful. As he puts it, A language is interpreted as a system of meanings,
accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be expressed (emphasis
mine).

So one way you can begin to make sense of the list of words above is to consider
them as a series of choices. In other words, I wrote Milk instead of Juice and
Spaghetti instead of Linguini. There must be some reason for this. You will still
probably not be able to recognize this as a text because you do not have any
understanding of what motivated these choices (why I wrote down these
particular words) and the relationship between one set of choices (e.g. Milk vs.
Juice) and another.

It is these two pieces of missing information the context of these choices TM and
the relationships between them which form the basis for what we will be calling
texture that quality that makes a particular set of words or sentences a text,

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rather than a random collection of linguistic items. A language speakers ability
to discriminate between a random string of sentences and one forming a
discourse, Halliday explains, is due to the inherent texture in the language and
to his awareness of it (Halliday 1968:210). According to this formulation, there

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 are two important things that make a text a text. One has to do with features
inherent in the language itself (things, for example, like grammatical rules),
which help us to understand the relationship among the different words and
sentences and other elements in the text. It is these features that help you to
figure out the relationship between the various sets of choices (either lexical or
grammatical) that you encounter. The problem with the text above is that there
is not much in the language itself that helps you to do this. There are, however,
two very basic things that help you to establish a connection among these words.
The first is the fact that they appear in a listthey come one after another. This
very fact helps to connect them together because you automatically think that
they would not have been put together in the same list if they did not have
something to do with one another.

Another internal thing that holds these words together as a potential text is that
they are similar; with the exception of Light bulbs, they all belong to the same
semantic field (i.e. words having to do with food). In fact, It is because of words
like Milk and Tomatoes that you are able to infer that what is meant by the
word Rocket is rocket lettuce (or arugula) rather than the kind of rocket that
shoots satellites into space. This semantic relationship among the words,
however, is probably still not enough for you to make sense of this list as a text
as long as you are relying only on features that are intrinsic to the language. The
reason for this is that there are no grammatical elements that join these words
together. It would be much easier for you to understand the relationship among
these words if they appeared in a conversation like this:

A: What do we need to get at the shop?
B: Well, we need some milk. And I want to make a salad, so lets get some
tomatoes and rocket. And, oh yeah, the light bulb in the living room is
burnt out. Wed better get some new ones.

In this conversation, the relationships between the different words is much
clearer because new words have been added. One important word that joins
these words together is and, which creates an additive relationship among
them, indicating that they are all part of a cumulative list. Other important words
are we and need. The verb need connects the things in the list to some kind of
action that is associated with them, and the word we connects them to some
people who are also involved in this action.

This second part of Hallidays formulation has to do with something that cannot
be found in the language itself, but rather exists inside the minds of the people
who are perceiving the text, what Halliday calls an awareness of the conventions
of the language (and, by extension, broader conventions of communication in a
given society) which helps us to work out the relationships among words, TM
sentences, paragraphs, pictures and other textual elements, as well as
relationships between these combinations of textual elements and certain social

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situations or communicative purposes. These conventions give us a kind of
framework within which we can fit the language. The framework for the text
above, for example, is a shopping list. As soon as you have that framework, this
list of words makes perfect sense as a text. In fact, you do not even need to refer

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 back to the conversation above to understand what the text means and how it
will be used. All of the information about what people do with shopping lists is
already part of your common knowledge (the knowledge you share with other
people in society).

There is still one more thing that helps you to make sense of this as a text, and
that has to do with the connections that exist between this particular collection
of words and other texts that exist outside of it. For example, this text might be
related to the conversation above. In fact, it might be the result of that
conversation: A might have written down this list as B dictated it to him or her.
It might also be related to other texts, like a recipe for rocket salad B found in a
cookbook. Finally, when A and B go to the supermarket, they will connect this
text to still other texts like signs advertising the price of tomatoes or the label on
the milk carton telling them the expiry date. In other words, all texts are
somehow related to other texts, and sometimes, in order to make sense of them
or use them to perform social actions, you need to make reference to these other
texts.

To sum up, the main thing that makes a text a text is relationships or connections.
Sometimes these relationships are between words, sentences or other elements
inside the text. These kinds of relationships create what we refer to as cohesion.
Another kind of relationship exists between the text and the person who is
reading it or using it in some way. Here, meaning comes chiefly from the
background knowledge the person has about certain social conventions
regarding texts as well as the social situation in which the text is found and what
the person wants to do with the text. This kind of relationship creates what we
call coherence. Finally, there is the relationship between one text and other texts
in the world that one might, at some point, need to refer to in the process of
making sense of this text. This kind of relationship creates what we call
intertextuality.

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 A3 TEXTS AND THEIR SOCIAL FUNCTIONS

In the previous section we talked about how the internal structure of a text and
the expectations we as readers have about it contribute to a texts texture. In this
section we will explore how the structures and expectations associated with
different kinds of texts contribute to how they function in the social world how
they help to define social activities and the groups of people who take part in
them.

Different patterns of texture are associated with different types of texts.
Newspaper articles, for example, tend to favor particular kinds of cohesive
devices and are structured in a conventional way with a summary of the main
points in the beginning and with the details coming later (see Section C2). To
understand why such textual conventions are associated with this type of text,
however, we need to understand something about the people who produce and
consume it and what they are doing with it. The study of the social functions of
different kinds of texts is called genre analysis.

The notion of genre is probably familiar to you from your experience as a
moviegoer. Different films belong to different genres: there are westerns, love
stories, horror movies, thrillers, chick flicks and many other film genres. Before
we go to the movies, we always have some idea about the film we are about to
see based on the genre that it belongs to. These expectations include not just
ideas about the kind of story the film will tell and the kinds of characters it will
include, but also ideas about things like cinematography, lighting, special effects
and other filming techniques. At the same time, of course, not all films fit neatly
into genres. We might go to a film called Scary Movie and find that it is actually a
comedy, or we might expect a film like Brokeback Mountain, whose poster
portrays cowboys, to be a western, only to find that it is also a love story. In fact,
one thing that makes such films so successful is that they creatively confound our
expectations by mixing different genres together.

The notion of genre in discourse analysis goes beyond examining the
conventional structures and features of different kinds of texts to asking what
these structures and features can tell us about the people who use the texts and
what they are using them to do. In his book Analyzing Genre, Vijay Bhatia,
drawing on the work of John Swales, defines genre as follows:

(A genre is) a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of
communicative purposes identified and mutually understood by members
of the community in which it occurs. Most often it is highly structured TMand
conventionalized with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of
their intent, positioning, form and functional value. These constraints,

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however, are often exploited by expert members of the discourse
community to achieve private intentions within the framework of the
socially recognized purpose(s). (Bhatia 1993:13, emphasis mine)

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 There are three important aspects to this definition which need to be further
explained: first, that genres are not defined as types of texts but rather as types
of communicative events; second, that these events are characterized by
constraints on what can and cannot be done within them; and third, that expert
users often exploit these constraints in creative and unexpected ways.

Genres are communicative events

While it might not seem unusual to refer to spoken genres like conversations and
debates and political speeches as events, thinking of written texts like
newspaper articles, recipes and job application letters as events might at first
seem rather strange. We are in many ways accustomed to thinking of texts as
objects. Seeing them as events, however, highlights the fact that all texts are
basically instances of people doing things with or to other people: a newspaper
article is an instance of someone informing someone else about some recent
event; a recipe is an instance of someone instructing another person how to
prepare a particular kind of food; and a job application letter is an instance of
someone requesting that another person give him or her a job. As Martin (1985:
250) points out, genres are how things get done, when language is used to
accomplish them. Thus, the ways different kinds of texts are put together is
inseparable from the things the text is trying to get done in a particular
historical, cultural and social context.

Of course, most texts are not just trying to get only one thing done. The
communicative purposes of texts are often multiple and complex. A recipe, for
example, may be persuading you to make a certain dish (or to buy a certain
product with which to make it) as much as it is instructing you how to do it, and a
newspaper article might be attempting not just to inform you about a particular
event, but also to somehow affect your opinion about it. The different people
using the text might also have different purposes in mind: while a job applicant
sees his or her application letter as a way to convince a prospective employer to
hire him or her, the employer might see the very same application letter as a
means of weeding out unsuitable candidates.

Conventions and Constraints

Because genres are about getting things done, the way they are structured and
the kinds of features they contain are largely determined by what people want to
do with them. The kinds of information I might include in a job application, for
example, would be designed to convince a prospective employer that I am the
right person for the job. This information would probably not include my rTM ecipe
for chocolate brownies or my opinion about some event I read about in a
newspaper. Genres, therefore, come with built-in constraints as to what kinds of
things they can include and what kinds of things they cannot, based on the

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activity they are trying to accomplish.

These constraints govern not just what can be included, but also how it should be
included. In my job application letter, for example, I would probably want to

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 present the information in a certain order, beginning by indicating the post I am
applying for, and then going on to describe my qualifications and experience, and
ending by requesting an appointment for an interview. Putting this information
in a different order, for example, waiting until the end of the letter to indicate the
post for which I am applying, would be considered odd.

The order in which I do things in a genre, what in genre analysis is called the
move structure of a particular genre, often determines how successfully I am
able to fulfill the communicative purpose of the genre. Stating which post I am
applying for at the beginning of my job application letter is a more efficient way
of introducing the letter because it helps to create a framework for the
information that comes later.

But what is important about these conventions and constraints is not just that
they make communicative events more efficient, but also that they demonstrate
that the person who produced the text knows how we do things. Prospective
employers read application letters not just to find out what post an applicant is
applying for and what qualifications or experience that person has, but also to
find out if that person knows how to write a job application letter. In other
words, the ability to successfully produce this type of genre following particular
conventions is taken as an indication that the writer is a certain kind of person
with a certain level of education who knows how to communicate like us. In
fact, for some employers, the qualifications that applicants demonstrate through
successfully producing this genre are far more important than those they
describe in the letter itself.

Creativity

That is not to say that all job application letters, or other genres like newspaper
articles and recipes, are always exactly the same. As the directors of the hybrid
films described above can tell us, often the most successful texts are those which
break the rules, defy conventions and push the boundaries of constraints. Expert
producers of texts, for example, sometimes mix different kinds of texts together,
or embed one genre into another, or alter in some way the moves that are
included or the order in which they are presented. Of course, there are
limitations to how much a genre can be altered and still be successful at
accomplishing what its producers want to accomplish. There are always risks
associated with being creative.

There are several important points to be made here. The first is that such
creativity would not be possible without the existence of conventions and
constraints, and the reason innovations can be effective is that they play oTM ff or
exploit previously formed expectations. The second is that such creativity must
itself have some relationship to the communicative purpose of the genre and the
context in which it is used. Writing a job application letter in the form of a

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sonnet, for example, may be more effective if I want to get a job as an editor at a
literary magazine than if I want to get a job as a software engineer. Finally, being
able to successfully bend and blend genres is very much a matter of and a

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 marker of expertise: in order to break the rules effectively, you must also be able
to show that you have mastered the rules.

Discourse Communities

It should be clear by now that at the center of the concept of genre is the idea of
belonging. We produce and use genres not just in order to get things done, but
also to show ourselves to be members of particular groups and to demonstrate
that we are qualified to participate in particular activities. Genres are always
associated with certain groups of people that have certain common goals and
common ways of reaching these goals. Doctors use medical charts and
prescriptions to do the work of curing people. Solicitors use contracts and legal
briefs to defend peoples rights. As a student, you and your teachers use things
like textbooks, handouts, PowerPoint presentations and examinations to
accomplish the tasks of teaching and learning. These different genres not only
help the people in these groups get certain things done; they also help to define
these groups, to keep out people who do not belong in them, and to regulate the
relationships between the people who do belong.

John Swales calls these groups discourse communities. In the excerpt from his
book Genre Analysis (1990) which is included in Section D3, he describes a
number of features that define discourse communities, among which are that
they consist of expert members whose job it is to socialize new members into
how things are done, that members have ways of regularly communicating with
and providing feedback to one another, and that members tend to share a certain
vocabulary or jargon. The two most important characteristics of discourse
communities are that members have common goals and common means of
reaching those goals (genres). These goals and the means of reaching them work
to reinforce each other. Every time a member makes use of a particular genre, he
or she not only moves the group closer to the shared goals, but also validates
these goals as worthy and legitimate and shows him or herself to be a worthy
and legitimate member of the group.

Thus, genres not only link people together, they also link people with certain
activities, identities, roles and responsibilities. In a very real way, then, genres
help to regulate and control what people can do and who people can be in
various contexts (see Section A8).

This regulation and control is exercised in a number of ways. First of all, since
the goals of the community and the ways those goals are to be accomplished are
built-in to the texts that members of a discourse community use on a daily basis,
it becomes much more difficult to question those goals. Since mastery of the TM
genre is a requirement for membership, members must also buy in to the goals
of the community. Finally, since texts always create certain kinds of relationships
between those who have produced them and those who are using them, when

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the conventions and constraints associated with texts become fixed and difficult
to change, these roles and relationships also become fixed and difficult to change.
When looked at in this way, genres are not just text types that are structured in

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 certain ways and contain certain linguistic features; they are important tools
through which people, groups and institutions define, organize and structure
social reality.

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 A4 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY

In the last two sections we looked at the ways texts are structured and the social
functions they fulfill for different groups of people. In this section we will
examine how texts promote certain points of view or versions of reality. We will
focus on four things: 1) the ways authors create versions of reality based on
their choice of words and how they combine words together; 2) the ways
authors construct certain kinds of relationships between themselves and their
readers; 3) the ways authors appropriate the words of other people and how
they represent those words; and 4) the ways authors of texts draw upon and
reinforce the larger systems of belief and knowledge that govern what counts as
right or wrong, good or bad, and normal or abnormal in a particular society,
systems which we referred to earlier as capital D Discourses.

Whether we are aware of it our not, our words are never neutral. They always
represent the world in a certain way and create certain kinds of relationships
with the people with whom we are communicating. For this reason, texts always
to some degree promote a particular ideology. What I mean by an ideology is a
specific set of beliefs and assumptions people have about things like what is good
and bad, what is right and wrong, and what is normal and abnormal. Ideologies
provide us with models of how the world is supposed to be. In some respects
ideologies help to create a shared worldview and sense of purpose among people
in a particular group. On the other hand, ideologies also limit the way we look at
reality and tend to marginalize or exclude altogether people, things and ideas
that do not fit into these models.

All texts, even those that seem rather innocuous or banal, somehow involve
these systems of inclusion and exclusion. Often when you fill out a form, like a
university application form, for example, or an application for a drivers license,
you are asked to indicate whether you are married or single. One thing that this
question does is reinforce the idea that your marital status is an important
aspect of your identity (although it may have very little bearing on whether or
not you are qualified to either study in university or drive a car). Another thing it
does is limit this aspect of your identity to one of only two choices. Other choices
like divorced, widowed or in a civil partnership are often not offered, nor are
choices having to do with other important relationships in your life, like your
relationships with your parents or your siblings. In China, such forms often ask
this question slightly differently, offering the categories of (married) or
(single, or literally not yet married). These two choices not only exclude
people in the kinds of relationships mentioned above but also people like
Buddhist monks and confirmed bachelors who have no intention of getting TM
married. They also promote the idea that being married is somehow the natural
or normal state of affairs.

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In such cases, it is fair to ask how much you are answering questions about
yourself, and how much the forms themselves are constructing you as a certain

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 kind of person by enabling some choices and constraining others. In other words,
are you filling out the form, or is the form filling out you?

In this strand we will explore ways in which people construct these systems of
inclusion and exclusion in texts, and the ways they use them to promote certain
versions of reality and to create or reinforce in readers certain beliefs.

Whos Doing Whats

The linguist Michael Halliday (1994) pointed out that whenever we use language
we are always doing three things at once: we are in some way representing the
world: which he called the ideational function1 of language; we are creating,
ratifying or negotiating our relationships with the people with whom we are
communicating, which he called the interpersonal function of language, and we
are joining sentences and ideas together in particular ways to form cohesive and
coherent texts, which he called the textual function of language. All of these
functions play a role in the way a text promotes a particular ideology or
worldview. In Section A2 we looked at the textual function, discussing how
different ways of connecting ideas together and of structuring them based on
larger sets of expectations help us to make sense of texts, but can also reinforce
certain assumptions about people, things and ideas and how they are linked
together (see Section B2). In this section we will be focusing more on the
ideational and the interpersonal functions of language.

According to Halliday, we represent the world through language by choosing
words that represent people, things or concepts (participants), and words about
what these participants are doing to, with or for one another (processes). All texts
contain these two elements: participants and processes. James Paul Gee (2011)
calls them whos doing whats.

Rather than talking about texts representing reality, however, it might be better
to talk about texts constructing reality, since, depending on the words they
choose to represent the whos doing whats in a particular situation, people can
create very different impressions of what is going on. First of all, we might
choose different words to represent the same kinds of participant. In traditional
church wedding ceremonies in many places, for example, the convener of the
ceremony (often a priest or a minister), after the couple have taken their vows,
will pronounce them man and wife. By using different kinds of words to
describe the groom and the bride, this utterance portrays them as two different
kinds of beings, and as fundamentally unequal. This choice of words gives to the
man an independent identity, but makes the womans (the wifes) identity
contingent on her relationship to the man. Nowadays, many churches have TM

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1 Halliday uses the term metafunctions to distinguish these three fundamental functions from
more secondary functions of language. I will refer to these metafunctiuons simply as functions.

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 changed their liturgies to make this I now pronounce you husband and wife in
order to present the two individuals as more equal.2

The words we use for processes and how we use them to link participants
together can also create different impressions of what is going on. One of the key
things about processes is that they always construct a certain kind of relationship
between participants. Halliday calls this relationship transitivity. An important
aspect of transitivity when it comes to ideology has to do with which participants
are portrayed as performing actions and which are portrayed as having actions
done to or for them. In the same kinds of traditional church weddings described
above, after pronouncing the couple man and wife the convener might turn to
the man and say, you may now kiss the bride. Anyone who has attended such a
wedding knows that this sentence is usually not an accurate description of what
happens next: it is not just the groom who kisses the bride; the bride also kisses
the groom; they kiss each other. Rather, it as an ideological interpretation of
what happens. Making the male participant the actor in the process (kissing)
constructs him as the person in charge of the situation, and the woman as a
passive recipient of his kiss, thus reinforcing many assumptions about the roles
of men and women, especially in romantic and sexual relationships, which are
still deeply held in some societies. As with the statement I now pronounce you
man and wife, in many places this has changed in recent years, with the couple
either simply kissing after the declaration of marriage or the officiant saying
something like you may now kiss each other.

Relationships

Another important way texts promote ideology is in the relationships they create
between the people who are communicating and between communicators and
what they are communicating about, what Halliday calls the interpersonal
function of language. We construct relationships through words we choose to
express things like certainty and obligation (known as the system of modality in
a language). The traditional priest or minister described above, for example,
typically says you may now kiss the bride, rather than kiss the bride!,
constructing the action as a matter of permission rather than obligation and
constructing himself or herself as someone who, while having a certain power
over the participants, is there to assist them in doing what they want to do rather
than to force them to do things they do not want to do.

Another way we use language to construct relationships is through the style of
speaking or writing that we choose. To take the example of the convener of the
wedding ceremony again, he or she says, you many now kiss the bride, rather
than something like why dont you give her a kiss! This use of more formal
TM
language helps create a relationship of respectful distance between the couple

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2
The liturgy of the Church of England still retains the traditional form. When Prince William
married Kate Middleton in 2011, the Archbishop of Canterbury said: I pronounce that they be
man and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

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 and the officiant and maintains an air of seriousness in the occasion. The Russian
literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin calls these different styles of speaking and writing
social languages, a term which is also used by James Paul Gee (see Section D4).
Bakhtin defines them as social dialects, characteristic group behavior,
professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age
groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities of various circles and
of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of
the day (1981, p. 262).

Halliday is more likely to see degrees of formality in language as a matter of
what he calls register, the different ways we use language in different situations
depending on the topic we are communicating about, the people with whom we
are communicating, and the channel through which we are communicating (e.g.
formal writing, instant messaging, face-to-face conversation) (see Section A7).
Like genres, social languages (or registers) tend to link us to different groups and
communicate that we are certain kinds of people. They also show something
about the relationships we have with the people with whom we are
communicating. Most people, for instance, use a different social language when
they are talking or writing to their boss than when they are talking or writing to
their peers.

Intertextuality

As we have mentioned before, texts often refer to or somehow depend for their
meaning on other texts. We called the relationship texts create with other texts
intertextuality, and intertextuality is another important way ideologies are
promoted in discourse.

According to Bakhtin, all texts involve some degree of intertextuality. We cannot
speak or write, he argues, without borrowing the words and ideas of other
people, and nearly everything we say or write is in some way a response to some
previous utterance or text and an anticipation of some future one.
When we appropriate the words and ideas of others in our texts and utterances,
we almost always end up communicating how we think about those words and
ideas (and the people who have said or written them) in the way we represent
them. We might, for example, quote them verbatim, paraphrase them, or refer to
them in an indirect way, and we might characterize them in certain ways using
different reporting words like said, or insisted, or claimed.
In the 1980s the British singer Sir Elton John sang a song called Kiss the Bride
which contained the following lyrics:

I wanna kiss the bride yeah! TM
I wanna kiss the bride yeah!
Long before she met him
She was mine, mine, mine.

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In the version of reality constructed by this song, the words I wanna kiss the
bride seemingly arise in response to the convener of a marriage ceremony

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 saying to the groom you may now kiss the bride. While the singer appropriates
verbatim the words of the convener, by positioning himself as the kisser of a
bride who is not his, he transforms these words, using them to undermine
rather than ratify the marriage that is being performed.

Intertextuality does not just involve mixing other peoples words with ours. It
can also involve mixing genres (see Section A3) and mixing social languages. In
the excerpt from James Gee reprinted in Section D4, for example, he examines
how the authors of the label on an aspirin bottle mix together different social
languages.

Discourses

It should be quite clear by now that even a seemingly innocent phrase like you
may now kiss the bride can be seen as ideological. That is to say, it promotes
what Gee calls a set of frozen theories or generalizations about the world, in this
case generalizations about brides and grooms and men and women and how
they are supposed to act in the context of marriage. Gee calls these frozen
theories cultural models (see Section B2). Cultural models are sets of
expectation that we have about how different kinds of people should behave and
communicate in different situations. They serve an important role in helping us
make sense of the texts and the situations that we encounter in our lives. At the
same time, however, they also function to exclude certain people or certain ways
of behaving from our consideration.

Cultural models are not random and free floating. They are parts of larger
systems of knowledge, values and social relationships that grow up within
societies and cultures which Gee calls capital D Discourses. Other people have
used different terms. The French philosopher Michel Foucault calls these
systems orders of discourse, and gives as examples things like clinical
discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric
discourse (1972: 121).

The phrase you may now kiss the bride, then, does not just enforce a theory
about how brides and grooms are supposed to act during a marriage ceremony,
but also invokes broader theories about marriage gender relations, love, sex,
morality and economics. All of these theories are part of a system of discourse
which we might call the Discourse of marriage.

According to Foucault, Discourses can exert a tremendous power over us by
creating constraints regarding how certain things can be talked about and what
counts as knowledge in particular contexts. At the same time, it is also TM
important to remember that Discourses are complex and often contain internal
contradictions. They also change over time. In pre 19th century Europe, for
example, the strongest values promoted in the Discourse of marriage were those

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of duty and commitment. Most marriages were arranged and divorce was illegal
in many countries. The contemporary Discourse of marriage in Europe and many
other places has changed considerably, emphasizing more the values of love and

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 personal fulfillment, which is not to say that the previous ideas of duty and
commitment are no longer important. Because of the rich and fluid nature of
Discourses, they can sometimes be invoked to promote different ideological
positions.

The values of commitment and love associated with the Discourse of marriage,
for example, might be invoked in ways that promote traditional ideas of
marriage and traditional gender roles within it, or they might be invoked to
promote non-traditional views of marriage, as 19-year-old Iowa university
student Zach Wahls did in an address before the Iowa State Legislature in which
he defended the marriage of his two mothers (see Section D3), saying:

The sense of family comes from the commitment we make to each other
to work through the hard times so that we can enjoy the good ones. It
comes from the love that binds us, thats what makes a family.

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 A5 SPOKEN DISCOURSE

So far we have been focusing mostly on the analysis of written texts. In this
section we will begin to consider some of the special aspects of spoken discourse.
In many ways, speech is not so different from writing. When people speak they
also produce different kinds of genres (such as casual conversations, debates,
lectures and speeches of various kinds) and use different kinds of social
languages. They also promote particular versions of reality or ideologies. But
there are some ways in which speech is very different from writing.

First of all, speech is more interactive. While we do often expect and receive
feedback for our writing, especially when it comes to new media genres like
blogs, this feedback is usually delayed. When we speak we usually do so in real
time with other people, and we receive their responses to what we have said
right away. As we carry on conversations, we decide what to say based on what
the previous speaker has said as well as what we expect the subsequent speaker
to say after we have finished speaking. We can even alter what we are saying as
we go along based on how other people seem to be reacting to it. Similarly,
listeners can let us know immediately whether they object to or do not
understand what we are saying. In other words, conversations are always co-
constructed between or among the different parties having them.

Second, speech tends to be more transient and spontaneous than writing. When
we write, we often plan what we are going to write carefully, and we often read
over, revise and edit what we have written before showing it to other people.
Because writing has a certain permanence, people can also read what we have
written more carefully. They can read it quickly or slowly, and they can re-read it
as many times as they like. They can also show it to other people and get their
opinions about it. Speech, on the other hand, is usually not as well planned as
writing. While some genres like formal speeches and lectures are planned, most
casual conversation is just made up as we go along. It is also transient; that is to
say, our words usually disappear the moment we utter them. This makes
listening in some ways more challenging than reading. Unless our words are
recorded, people cannot return to them, save them or transport them into other
contexts. While they might be able to remember what we have said and repeat it
to other people, it is never exactly the same as what we have actually said.
Finally, speech tends to be less explicit than writing. The reason for this is that
when we are speaking, we often also depend on other methods of getting our
message across. We communicate with our gaze, our gestures, our facial
expressions and the tone of our voice. When we are writing we do not have these
tools at our disposal, and so we often need to depend more on the words TM
themselves to express our meaning. Speech also usually takes place in some kind
of physical context which participants share, and often the meaning of what we

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say is dependent on this context. We can use words like this and that and here
and there and expect that the people we are speaking to can understand what
we are talking about based on the physical environment in which the
conversation takes place.

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Of course, there are many kinds of speech that do not share all of the features we
have discussed above. People engaged in telephone conversations, for example,
like readers and writers, are situated in different places and cannot rely on
physical cues like gestures and facial expressions to convey meaning, although
their conversations are still interactive. When people speak to us through
television and cinema, on the other hand, while we can see their gestures and
facial expressions, we cannot usually respond to what they are saying in real
time. There are also certain kinds of conversations that share features of both
speech and writing. Instant messaging and text-based computer chats, for
example, are, like speech, interactive and usually fairly unplanned, while at the
same time, like writing, they involve a certain amount of permanence (the words
we write remain in chat windows for some time after we have written them and
may be stored as history files). They also lack the non-verbal cues that are part
of physical co-presence. We will deal more with this type of mediated
communication later. In this strand we will focus mainly on real-time, face-to-
face interaction.

Making sense of conversations

In this strand we will deal with a specific problem that people encounter when
they engage in conversation. This problem is related to some of the features of
spoken language described above. The problem is that quite often in
conversation people do not mean what they say, and people do not say what they
mean. In the first section of this book we gave the example of someone asking to
borrow a pen with the words Do you have a pen, and pointed out that, strictly
speaking, this utterance is really a question about whether or not someone
possesses a pen rather than a request to borrow one. Similarly, in the comic strip
below (Figure A5.1), when Calvins mother says What are you doing to the coffee
table?! she is not so much asking a question as she is expressing shock and
disapproval offering a rebuke. The humor in Calvins response lies in the fact
that he has taken her utterance to be a question rather than a rebuke.
Interestingly, we regard Calvin, who operates on the principle that people should
mean what they say, as the uncooperative party in this conversation rather than
his mother, who, strictly speaking, does not say what she means.

TM

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Figure A5.1 Calvin and Hobbs (Universal Press Syndicate All Rights Reserved)

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 Although, as we have seen, there is also a certain amount of ambiguity in written
language, this problem is much more common in spoken language due in part to
its inexplicit, context-specific nature. And so, the problem is, if people do not say
what they mean or mean what they say, how are we able to make sense of what
they say and successfully engage in conversations with them?
This problem is exasperated by the fact that we have to make decisions about
what we think people mean rather quickly in conversations in order for the
conversations to proceed smoothly, which increases the chances for
misunderstanding.

In order to understand how participants in conversations deal with this problem,
we will be drawing on two different analytical traditions, one with its roots in
philosophy and the other with its roots in sociology. These two traditions are
called pragmatics and conversation analysis.

Pragmatics is the study of how people use words to accomplish actions in their
conversations: actions like requesting, threatening and apologizing. It aims to
help us understand how people figure out what actions other people are trying
to take with their words and respond appropriately. It has its roots primarily in
the work of three philosophers of language: John Austin, John Searle, and
Herbert Paul Grice.

Conversation analysis, on the other hand, comes out of a tradition in sociology
called ethnomethodology, which focuses on the methods ordinary members of a
society use to interact with one another and interpret their experience. It was
developed by three sociologists, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail
Jefferson, and studies the procedural rules that people use to cooperatively
manage conversations and make sense of what is going on.

Because these two analytical frameworks come out of such different intellectual
traditions, they approach the problem we discussed above in two very different
ways. With its roots in philosophy, pragmatics tends to approach the problem as
a matter of logic, asking what conditions need to be present for a participant in a
conversation to logically conclude that a given utterance has a certain meaning
(or pragmatic force). With its roots in sociology, conversation analysis
approaches the problem not as one of abstract logic, but as one of locally
contingent action. According to this perspective, people make sense of what
other people say not by figuring it out logically, but by paying attention to the
local conditions of the conversation itself, especially the sequence of utterances.

Rather than being mutually exclusive, these two approaches represent two
different windows on the phenomenon of conversation, with each illuminating a
different aspect of it. In the sections that follow, we will be introducing even
TM
more perspectives that focus on different aspects of spoken interaction. Taking
these various perspectives together will lead us to a rich and comprehensive

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understanding of what people are doing when they engage in conversation and
how they cope with the unique challenges of spoken discourse as well as more
interactive written discourse like some forms of computer-mediated
communication.

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 A6 STRATEGIC INTERACTION

In the last section we talked about how utterances in conversations are used to
perform certain kinds of actions like greeting, requesting, inviting, warning and
apologizing. But usually these actions taken alone do not constitute
conversations. Conversations happen when multiple actions are put together to
form activities: we chat, we debate, we flirt, we counsel, we gossip, we
commiserate, and we do many other things in our conversations. At the same
time, we use conversations to show that we are certain kinds of people and to
establish and maintain certain kinds of relationships with the people with whom
we are talking. We do not, however, engage in these activities and construct
these identities and relationships all by ourselves. We must always negotiate
what we are doing and who we are being with the people with whom we are
interacting. We call the methods we use to engage in these negotiations
conversational strategies.

In this strand we will focus on two basic kinds of conversational strategies: face
strategies and framing strategies. Face strategies have to do primarily with
showing who we are and what kind of relationship we have with the people with
whom we are talking. Framing strategies have more to do with showing what we
are doing in the conversation, whether we are, for example, arguing, teasing,
flirting or gossiping. As we shall see, however, face strategies also contribute to
the management of conversational activities (especially those involving face
threatening acts), and framing strategies are often central to the discursive
construction of identity.

These two concepts for analyzing how we manage conversations come from an
approach to discourse known as interactional sociolinguistics, which is concerned
with the sometimes very subtle ways people signal and interpret what they think
they are doing and who they think they are being in social interaction. It is
grounded primarily in the work of the anthropologist John Gumperz (1982a,
1982b) who drew on insights from anthropology and linguistics as well as the
fields of pragmatics and conversation analysis that we discussed in the previous
section. One of the most important insights Gumperz had was that people
belonging to different groups have different ways of signaling and interpreting
cues about conversational identity and conversational activities, and this can
sometimes result in misunderstandings and even conflict. Not surprisingly,
interactional sociolinguistics has been used widely in studies of intercultural
communication, including some of the early studies by Gumperz himself of
communication between Anglo-British and people of South Asian origin in the
U.K. TM

Another important influence on interactional sociolinguistics comes from the

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American sociologist Erving Goffman, who, in his classic book The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life (1959), compared social interaction to a dramatic
performance. Social actors in everyday life, he argued, like stage actors, use
certain expressive equipment like costumes, props, and settings to perform

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 certain roles and routines. Our goal in these performances is to promote our
particular line or version of who we are and what is going on. Most of the time,
other people help us to maintain our line, especially if we are willing to help
them to maintain theirs. Sometimes, however, peoples lines are not entirely
compatible, which means they need to negotiate an acceptable common line or
else risk spoiling the performance for one or more of the participants.
It was Goffman who contributed to discourse analysis the concepts of face and
frames. By face he meant the positive social value a person effectively claims
for himself by the line others assume he has taken (1967: 41). In other words,
for Goffman a persons face is tied up with how successful he or she is at pulling
off his or her performance and getting others to accept his or her line. What he
meant by frames was definitions of a situation (that) are built up in accordance
with principals of organization which govern events. The concept of framing
relates to how we negotiate these definitions of situations with other people
and use them as a basis for communicating and interpreting meaning.

Showing who we are: Face strategies

Social identity is a complex topic and one that we will return to later in this book.
For now we will focus on one fundamental aspect of identity: the fact that our
identities are always constructed in relation to the people with whom we are
interacting. Some people are our friends, and others are complete strangers.
Some people are our superiors and others are our subordinates. When we talk,
along with conveying information about the topic about which we are talking, we
always convey information about how close to or distant from the people with
whom we are talking we think we are, along with information about whether we
are social equals or whether one has more power than the other. The strategies
we use to do this are called face strategies.

The concept of face in its more everyday sense will be familiar to many readers.
The term is often used to denote a persons honor or reputation. Many cultures
have the notions of giving people face (helping them to maintain a sense of
dignity or honor) and of losing face (when people, for some reason of another
suffer a loss of dignity or honor). The definition of face we will be using here,
while not far from the more everyday meaning, is based primarily on the work of
Goffman and other social scientists. We define face as the negotiated public
image mutually granted to each other by participants in a communicative event
(Scollon, Scollon and Jones 2011).

There are three important aspects to this definition: The first is that ones face is
ones public image rather than ones true self. This means that the social image
that constitutes face is not the same in every interaction in which we engage. TMWe
wear different faces for different people. The second important aspect of this
definition is that this image is negotiated. That is to say, it is always the result of
a kind of give and take with the person or people with whom we are interacting,

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and throughout a given interaction the image that we present and the images
others project to us may undergo multiple adjustments. Finally, this image is
mutually granted. In other words, successfully presenting a certain face in

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 interaction depends on the people with whom we are interacting cooperating
with us. This is because face is the aspect of our identity which defines us in
relation to others. If one persons idea of the relationship is different from the
other persons idea, chances are one or the other will end up losing face. And so,
in this regard, the everyday ideas of giving face and losing face are also quite
important in our definition of face.

There are basically two broad kinds of strategies we use to negotiate our
identities and relationships in interaction. The first we will call involvement
strategies. They are strategies we use to establish or maintain closeness with
the people with whom we are interacting to show them that we consider them
our friends. These include things like calling people by their first names or using
nicknames, using informal language, showing interest in someone by, for
example, asking personal questions, and emphasizing our common experiences
or points of view. While such strategies can be used to show friendliness as
we will see in the next section they can also be used to assert power over
people. Teachers, for example, often use such strategies when interacting with
young students, and bosses sometimes use them when interacting with their
employees.

The second class of face strategies is known as independence strategies. These
are strategies we use to establish or maintain distance from the people with
whom we are interacting either because we are not their friends, or, more
commonly, because we wish to show them respect by not imposing on them.
They include using more formal language and terms of address, trying to
minimize the imposition, being indirect, apologizing and trying to depersonalize
the conversation (see Table A6.1).

Table 6.1 Face strategies

Involvement Strategies Independence Strategies

Using first names or nicknames Using tiles (Good afternoon,
(Hey, Rodders!) Professor Jones.)

Expressing interest (What have Apologizing (Im terribly sorry to
you been up to lately?) bother you.)

Claiming a common point of Admitting differences (Of course,
view (I know exactly what you you know much more about it than
mean.) I do.)

Making assumptions (I know you Not making assumptions (How TM
love lots of sugar in your coffee.) would you like your coffee today?)

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Using informal language (Gotta Using formal language (Pardon me,
minute?) can you spare a few moments?)

Being direct (Will you come?) Being indirect and hedging (I

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 wonder if you might possibly drop
by.)

Being optimistic (Im sure youll Being pessimistic (Im afraid youll
have a great time.) find it a bit boring.)

Being voluble (talking a lot) Being taciturn (not talking much)

Talking about us Talking about things other than
us

These two kinds of face strategies correspond to two fundamentally and, in some
ways, contradictory social needs that all humans experience: we all have the
need to be liked (sometimes referred to as our positive face), and we all have the
need to be respected (in the sense of not being imposed on or interfered with
(sometimes referred to as our negative face). When we interact with others, we
must constantly attend to their need to be liked and respected, and constantly
protect our own need to be liked and respected (Brown and Levinson 1987).
How we balance and negotiate these needs in communication is fundamental to
the way we show who we are in relation to the people around us.
In any given interaction we are likely to use a combination of both of these
strategies as we negotiate our relationships with the people with whom we are
interacting. In Section B6 we will go into more detail about how we decide which
of these strategies to use, when, and with whom.

Showing what we are doing: Framing strategies

In order to understand one another, we have to interpret what other people say
in the context of some kind of overall activity in which we are mutually involved.
One could think of many examples of utterances whose meanings change based
on what the people are doing when they utter them. The meaning of the
utterance by a doctor of the phrase, please take off your clothes is different if
uttered in the context of a medical examination or in the context of his or her
apartment. For different kinds of activities we have different sets of expectations
about what kinds of things will be said and how those things ought to be
interpreted. We call these sets of expectations frames.

Goffman took his idea of frames from the work of the anthropologist Gregory
Bateson, who used it to explain the behavior of monkeys he had observed at the
zoo. Sometimes, he noticed, the monkeys displayed hostile signals, seemingly
fighting with or attempting to bite one another. It soon became clear to him,
however, that the monkeys were not actually fighting; they were playing. ITM t then
occurred to him that they must have some way of communicating to one another
how a particular display of aggression should be interpreted, whether as an

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invitation to fight or an invitation to play.

We bring to most interactions a set of expectations about the overall activity in
which we will be engaged, which Goffman called the primary framework of the

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 interaction. When we are a patient in a medical examination, for example, we
expect that the doctor will touch us, and we interpret this behavior as a method
for diagnosing our particular medical problem. When we attend a lecture, we do
so with an idea of what the activities of delivering a lecture and of listening to a
lecture involve.

Interaction, however, hardly ever involves just one activity. We often engage in a
variety of different activities within the primary framework. While lecturing, for
example, a lecturer might give explanations, tell jokes, or even rebuke members
of the audience if they are not paying attention. Similarly, medical examinations
might include multiple frames. In the reading in Section D6, Deborah Tannen and
Cynthia Wallat analyze how a doctor uses a playing frame while examining a
young child, and then switches back to a consultation frame when talking with
the childs mother. And so, when we are interacting with people, we change the
activities we are involved in as we go along and, like Batesons monkeys, we need
ways to signal these frame changes and ways to negotiate them with the people
with whom we are interacting.

TM

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 A7 CONTEXT, CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION

What is context?

By now it should be clear that what an utterance means and the effect it has on a
hearer depends crucially on the circumstances under which it is uttered. The
different approaches to spoken discourse we have considered so far all focus on
different aspects of these circumstances. Pragmatics focuses on the intentions of
speakers and the immediate conditions under which utterances are produced
(including the knowledge, goals and status of those who produce them).
Conversation analysis takes a rather narrower view, focusing on how talk
occurring immediately before and immediately after utterances creates the
circumstances for particular meanings to be produced. Finally, interactional
sociolinguistics examines how utterances are interpreted based on the
relationship of the participants and what they think they are doing, which are
negotiated using face strategies and contextualization cues. In this section we will
take a wider view of the circumstances in which conversations occur, taking into
account broader aspects of the situation as well as the cultural norms and
expectations of the people involved.

The idea that the meaning of utterances depends on the context in which they
are produced can be traced back to the anthropologist Bronislow Malinowski
and his 1923 paper, The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages, in which
he argued that we cannot understand the words spoken by members of societies
very different from our own through mere translation. We must also have an
understanding of the situation in which the words were spoken and the
significance of various relationships and activities in that situation to the
speakers. In other words, meaning is transmitted not just through words, but
through the ways words are embedded into social relationships, social goals and
activities, histories, and the beliefs, values and ideologies of a particular cultural
group.

The problem with this idea is determining exactly which aspects of the situation
or of cultural knowledge need to be taken into account in the production and
interpretation of utterances. Context could mean practically anything from the
place and time of day of an utterance, to the color of the clothing that the
speakers are wearing, to speakers political views or religious beliefs. How does
the discourse analyst figure out which aspects of context are relevant to the
production and interpretation of discourse and which are not? More to the point,
how do people immersed in conversation figure this out? TM

Since Malinowksi, a number of scholars have proposed models to address this
question. The linguist John Firth (1957), for example, proposed that context can

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be divided into three components:

1) The relevant features of participants, persons, personalities;

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 2) The relevant objects in the situation;
3) The effect of the verbal action.

Although Firths formulation highlights what are undoubtedly central aspects of
context, one nevertheless wonders why some elements are included and others
are not. Why, for example, is the setting or time not part of his model?
Furthermore, while one of the most important aspects of Firths model is his
insight that only those things that are relevant to the communication being
analyzed should be considered context, he does not fully explain how such
relevance is to be established.

Perhaps the most famous model of context is that developed by the linguist
Michael Halliday, whose ideas about the structure of texts and the functions of
language we have already discussed. Halliday, drawing heavily on the work of
both Malinowski and Firth, also proposed a three-part model of context. For him,
context consists of:

1) Field: the social action that is taking place;
2) Tenor: the participants, their roles and relationships;
3) Mode: the symbolic or rhetorical channel and the role which language
plays in the situation.

Halliday goes a bit further than Firth in explaining the relationship between
context and actual language use with his concept of register. By register, Halliday
means the different ways language is used in different situations in terms of
things like the content of what is said and the degree of formality with which it is
said. The basic distinction of register is between spoken language and written
language (see also Section A4).

Hallidays model of context, however, suffers some of the same problems as
Firths: without clearer definitions of the three categories, the analyst is unsure
where to fit things like the social identities of participants and their membership
in certain social groups (is that subsumed under role or can it be seen as part of
field?), or why things like the physical mode (or channel), the rhetorical form (or
genre) and the role language plays in the situation should be subsumed under
the same category (van Dijk 2008). Furthermore, like Firth, he fails to fully
address the issue of what makes some contextual features relevant to speakers
and others not.

Context and competence

TM
Halliday explains context from an essentially linguistic point of view, seeing it as
part of a languages system of meaning potential. There is no need to bring in
the question of what the speaker knows, he writes; the background to what he

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does is what he could do a potential, which is objective, not a competence,
which is subjective (1978: 38, emphasis mine). In sharp contrast to this position
is that of the linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes, for whom the notion of

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 competence is central to a model of context he called the ethnography of
speaking, or, as it is sometimes called, the ethnography of communication.

In his work, Hymes focused on the interaction between language and social life --
the ways using and understanding language are related to wider social and
cultural knowledge. Knowledge or mastery of the linguistic system alone, he
insisted, is not sufficient for successful communication. People also need to know
and master various rules, norms and conventions regarding what to say to
whom, when, where, and how which he called communicative competence. He
wrote:

The sharing of grammatical (variety) rules is not sufficient. There may be
persons whose English I can grammatically identify but whose messages
escape me. I may be ignorant of what counts as a coherent sequence,
request, statement requiring an answer, requisite or forbidden topic,
marking of emphasis or irony, normal duration of silence, normal level of
voice, etc., and have no metacommunitative means or opportunity for
discovering such things. (Hymes 1974: 49)

The question Hymes asked, therefore, was: What kinds of things do participants
in particular activities or speech events need to know in order to demonstrate
that they are competent members of a particular speech community? What
Hymes meant by speech community was not just a group of people who speak the
same language, but a group of people who share the rules and norms for using
and interpreting at least one language variety in particular contexts.

Like Halliday and Firth, Hymes developed a model of what he considered to be
the essential elements of context. Rather than just three components, however,
Hymess consists of eight, each component beginning with one of the letters of
the word SPEAKING.

S stands for setting
P stands for participants
E stands for ends
A stands for act sequence
K stands for key
I stands for instrumentalities
N stands for norms of interaction
G stands for genre

In some ways, although it seems more complete, Hymess model suffers from
the same fundamental problem as those of Firth and Hymes: why are some
elements included and others not? Why are there only eight elements rather TM
than nine or ten, and why are they divided up the way they are? The crucial
difference between this model and the others is that, for Hymes, these elements

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do not represent objective features of context, but rather, represent more
subjective features of competence, the kinds of things about which speakers need
to know to be considered competent communicators by other members of their
group.

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For Hymes, then, the subjective nature of context is not the weakness of his
model, but, in a way, the whole point of it. Even when the objective aspects of
context the status of the participants, the nature of the activity and the
semiotic modes being used remain the same, expectations about who should
say what to whom, when, where and how will still vary across different
communities of speakers.

An understanding of the communicative competence necessary in a particular
speech community in order to participate in a particular speech event cannot be
acquired with reference to the linguistic system alone, or simply through the
analysis of texts or transcripts of conversations. This is because what is of
importance is not just the meanings people communicate and how they are
communicated, but the meaning communication itself has for them in different
situations with different people. Understanding this requires a different
approach to the analysis of discourse, an approach which is summed up in the
word ethnography.

Ethnography is a research method developed in the field of anthropology which
is concerned with describing the lived experiences of people in particular social
groups. It involves not just analyzing the texts and talk that they produce from a
distance, but actually spending time with them, observing them as they use
language, and talking to them at length about the meanings they ascribe to
different kinds of utterances and different kinds of behavior.

Many of the approaches to discourse discussed earlier have begun to incorporate
ethnographic fieldwork: genre analysts, for example, typically interview
members of discourse communities about the kinds of texts they use and how
they use them; critical discourse analysts are increasingly focusing not just on
how producers of texts express ideology and reproduce power relations, but also
on how readers respond to and sometimes contest these ideological formations;
and issues of cross-cultural pragmatics are increasingly being explored through
ethnographic methods.

Look deeper into this topic online

TM

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 A8 MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

So far this book has presented different methods for the analysis of written and
spoken discourse. These methods include ways to understand how texts and
conversations are put together and how people make sense of them, as well as
how people use them to manage their activities and identities and to advance
their ideological agendas. We have also explored how context, from the narrow
context of the immediate situation to the broader context of culture can affect the
ways discourse is produced and interpreted.

In this strand we will step back and attempt to answer a more fundamental
question in discourse analysis: How do we determine what texts or
conversations are worth analyzing in the first place?

We are literally surrounded by discourse. In the course of a single day the
number of words we speak and hear and the number of texts that pass before
our eyes, from emails to advertising billboards to shop receipts, is mind-
boggling. In the excerpt reprinted in Section D8, Ron Scollon talks about just
some of the texts and spoken language involved in the simple activity of having a
cup of coffee at Starbucks. These include things like conversations between
customers and the cashier, the communication between the cashier and the
person making the coffee, the chatting that occurs between the people sitting at
tables and lounging on sofas throughout the shop, the writing on the paper cups
out of which they are drinking their beverages, the menu posted on the wall
above the counter, the name badges that the employees wear, the magazines and
newspapers provided for patrons to read, and the various advertisements and
posters hanging on the walls around the shop, to mention only a few. There is
also a whole host of texts and conversations that have contributed to this
moment of drinking coffee that are not immediately visible: training manuals
and work schedules for employees, orders and invoices for bulk coffee beans,
and conversations and text messages between friends planning when and where
they might meet up for a cup of coffee.

Given this complex situation, the most important question for a discourse analyst
is: where do I start? Which texts or utterances should I commence analyzing? For
most discourse analysts the answer to this question is: Whatever I happen to be
interested in. Thus, analysts interested in casual conversation might focus on the
talk that goes on between friends sitting at tables, analyst interested in
promotional discourse might zero in on the advertising posters or menu which
inform patrons of the drink of the month, and those interested in the speech
event of the service encounter might want to record or observe people ordering
TM
and paying for their coffee.

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In principle there is nothing wrong with this analyst centered approach from
which we can learn quite a lot about things like casual conversation, promotional
discourse and service encounters. What we might miss, however, is an
understanding of what the practice of having a cup of coffee at Starbucks is

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 really like for the actual participants involved, what this practice means to them,
how they go about performing it, and how it fits into their lives.

Mediated discourse analysis, the perspective on discourse that is the topic of this
section, approaches the problem of which discourse to analyze by asking the
simple question: Whats going on here? and then focusing on whatever texts,
conversations or other things play a part in whats going on.

Of course, the answer to that question might not be very simple. For one thing, it
is likely to be different depending on whom you ask: for a customer, it might be:
having a cup of coffee. For a worker it might be taking orders or making coffee
or bussing tables or more generally making a living. For a government health
inspector, it might be determining whether the shop complies with government
regulations when it comes to hygiene and food safety.

The focus of mediated discourse analysis is trying to understand the
relationships between whats going on and the discourse that is available in the
situation to perform these goings on. Certain kinds of discourse make certain
kinds of actions easier to perform and other kinds more difficult to perform. But
it is also interested in the relationship between these actions and the social
identities of the people involved. The point is not just that cashiers or customers
need to use certain kinds of discourse to perform certain kinds of actions, but
that it is chiefly by using these different kinds of discourse to perform these
actions that they enact their identities as cashiers and customers and health
inspectors. That is to say, we associate different kinds of actions and different
kinds of discourse with different kinds of people. We might find it odd to see
someone who is wearing a badge and uniform reading a newspaper and drinking
a cup of coffee at one of the tables, or a customer inspecting the cleanliness of the
espresso machine.

The point, then, is not that some discourse is more important than other
discourse. Rather, the point is that to really understand how discourse is
relevant to real life, we have to try to understand how different texts and
conversations are linked, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, to the
concrete, real-time actions that are going on in coffee shops and classrooms and
offices and on street corners at particular moments, and how these linkages
work to create social identities (like friends, colleagues, teachers, cashiers,
and customers) and social practices (like teaching a lesson or having a cup of
coffee).

Discourse and action

TM
One of the definitions of discourse given in the very first section of this book was
that discourse is language in use or, to put it another way, language in action.
Nearly all of the approaches to discourse analysis we have discussed are

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concerned in some way with the relationship between language and action.
According to speech act theory (see Section A5), for example, people use
language in order to accomplish particular actions like requesting, apologizing

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 and warning, and according to genre analysis (see Section A3), the structure of
genres is crucially determined by the actions that users are attempting to
accomplish with them within particular discourse communities.

Mediated discourse analysis has a similar focus on action, but, whereas these
other approaches start with the discourse and ask what kinds of social actions
speakers or writers can accomplish with it, mediated discourse analysis starts
with actions and asks what role discourse plays in them.

This may seem to be a rather small distinction, but it is actually a crucial one,
because it avoids the assumption that discourse (rather than other things like
espresso machines and coffee cups) is necessarily the most important cultural
tool involved in the action. It also reminds us that just because a piece of
discourse might be used to perform certain kinds of actions, the way people
actually use it may be to perform actions which we may not have expected.
People might just as easily use a newspaper to wrap fish and chips as to find out
about the latest news from Parliament. Ones relationship status on Facebook, as
we will see in Section C8, might just as easily be used to avoid giving information
about ones relationship status as to give it.

Thus, the unit of analysis in mediated discourse analysis is not the utterance or
speech act or adjacency pair or conversation or text, but rather the mediated
action, that is, the action that is mediated though these discursive tools or other
tools that may have nothing to do with language. Such an analysis begins with
two questions: What is the action going on here? and How does discourse figure
into this action?

The answer to the question What is the action going on here? might have a very
complex answer. As mentioned above, it might be different for different people,
and even for the same person, it might depend on how broadly or narrowly they
are focusing on what they are doing. The person operating the espresso machine
at Starbucks, for example, might say shes working or making a cappuccino or
steaming milk.

What this tells us is that actions are always dependent on other actions that
occur before them and are likely to occur after them, and that whatever one
identifies as an action can always be divided up into smaller and smaller actions.
In other words, actions are always related to other actions in complex patterns.
Often these patterns, such as the sequence of smaller actions and how they
combine to make larger actions, become conventionalized; in the same way
genres of written and spoken discourse can become conventionalized. When this
happens, we refer to these patterns of actions as social practices.
TM
Part of what a mediated discourse analyst focuses on is how small, discrete
actions like handing money to a cashier or steaming milk in a stainless steel

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pitcher come to be habitually joined with other actions and regarded by
participants as the social practices of having a cup of coffee or making a
cappuccino. In particular they are interested in the role discourse plays in
creating and sustaining these social practices.

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Like other analysts, then, mediated discourse analysts, through their interest in
social practices, are concerned with the ideological dimension of discourse, or
what James Paul Gee refers to as Discourses with a capital D. When chains of
actions occur over and over again in the same way in the same kinds of situations
involving the same kinds of people, they become social practices, and thus begin
to exert control over the people who carry them out: people come to be expected
to do things in a certain way and the things that they do come to be associated
with the kinds of social identities they are able to claim. Discourse of all kinds,
from training manuals to health regulations to conversations play a crucial role
in this process. In contrast to other approaches concerned with the ideological
nature of discourse, mediated discourse analysis does not focus so much on how
discourse itself expresses ideology, but rather how it is used to help create and
maintain the practices that come to exert control over us.

Look deeper into this topic online

TM

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 A9 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

In the first section of this book we said that one of the fundamental principles of
discourse analysis is that discourse includes more than just language. It also
involves things like non-verbal communication, images, music, and even the
arrangement of furniture in rooms and the spaces created by architectural
structures. We elaborated on this point a bit further in our examination of
spoken discourse, first noting how non-verbal cues can serve to signal the
frames within which an utterance is meant to be interpreted, and later how the
larger physical and cultural context including such things as setting, participants
and communication media can affect how language is produced and understood.
We took this point even further in the last section in our discussion of mediated
discourse analysis, suggesting that language is only one of many cultural tools
with which people take actions, and that focusing on language alone at the
expense of these other tools might result in a distorted picture of whats going
on.

This section introduces an approach to discourse called multimodal discourse
analysis which focuses more directly on these other tools or modes of
communication. Multimodal discourse analysts see discourse as involving
multiple modes which often work together. In a face-to-face conversation, for
example, people do not just communicate with spoken language. They also
communicate though their gestures, gaze, facial expressions, posture, dress, how
close or far away they stand or sit from each other, and many other things.
Similarly, written texts rarely consist only of words, especially nowadays. They
often include pictures, charts or graphs. Even the font that is used and the way
paragraphs are arranged on a page or screen can convey meaning.

The point of multimodal discourse analysis is not to analyze these other modes
instead of speech and writing, but to understand how different modes, including
speech and writing, work together in discourse. The point is also not to study
some special kind of discourse multimodal discourse but rather to
understand how all discourse involves the interaction of multiple modes.

The idea of a communicative mode (sometimes called a semiotic mode) should
not be confused with the notion of modality in linguistics (the way we express
possibility and obligation in language, discussed in Section B4), or with
Hallidays use of the term mode in his model of context (discussed in Section
A7). We also do not mean it the way some people in the field of rhetoric do when
they speak of modes of discourse (such as description, narration, exposition).
What we mean by mode in the context of multimodal discourse analysis is aTM
system for making meaning. So we can speak, for example, of the modes of
speech, writing, gesture, color, dress, and so on. Any system of signs that are

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used in a consistent and systematic way to make meaning can be considered a
mode.

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 Modes should also not be confused with media, which are the material carriers of
modes. Telephones, radios and computers are all media which can carry the
mode of spoken language. They can also carry other modes, such as music, and, in
the case of computers and some mobile telephones, many other modes like
written text and pictures.

Multimodal discourse analysis can generally be divided into two types: one
which focuses on texts like magazines, comic books, web pages, films and works
of art, and the other which focuses more on social interaction (sometimes
referred to as multimodal interaction analysis).

Perhaps the most influential approach to the multimodal analysis of texts has
grown out of the study of systemic functional grammar as it was developed by
M.A.K. Halliday, whose work we have already discussed at length. Hallidays view
is that grammar is a system of resources for making meaning shaped by the
kinds of things people need to do with language. Those applying this framework
to multimodal discourse analysis propose that other modes like images, music
and architecture also have a kind of grammar. In other words, their components
can be organized as networks of options that users choose from in order to
realize different meanings.

The most famous application of this idea is the book Reading Images: The
grammar of visual design, first published in 1996 by Gunther Kress and Theo van
Leeuwen, an excerpt from which is reprinted in Section D9. Before the
publication of this book, most of those involved in the analysis of images
assumed that their interpretation depended on their interaction with language
that images themselves were too vague to be understood on their own. In
contrast, Kress and van Leeuwen show that, while in many texts images and
language work together, images are not dependent on written text, but rather
have their own way of structuring and organizing meaning their own
grammar. This approach has also been applied to other modes such as music
(van Leeuwen, 1999), architecture (OToole, 1994), color (van Leeuwen, 2011),
hypermedia (Djonov, 2007), and mathematical symbolism (OHalloran, 2005).
It is important to note, however, that this approach does not involve simply
applying the grammatical rules derived from the study of language to other
modes. Instead, each mode is seen to have its own special way of organizing
meaning, and it is the task of the analyst to discover what that system is,
independent of other systems.

The second approach to multimodal discourse analysis grows more out of
traditions associated with the analysis of spoken discourse, especially
conversation analysis (see Section A5), interactional sociolinguistics (see Section
A6), and the ethnography of speaking (see Section A7). Some of the more rTM ecent
work in what has come to be known as multimodal interaction analysis (Norris
2004) has also been influenced by meditated discourse analysis (see Section A8).

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In analyzing multimodality in interaction, analysts pay attention to many of the
same kinds of things they do when they analyze spoken language, especially
sequentiality, how elements are ordered in relation to one another, and
simultaneity, how elements that occur at the same time affect one another. A

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 multimodal discourse analyst, for example, might look for patterns in the
ordering of non-verbal behavior in a conversation, like the role things like gaze
play in the regulation of turn taking, or at how the meanings of utterances are
affected by non-verbal behavior that is occurring at the same time or visa versa,
such as gestures of facial expressions which serve to contextualize utterances.

One of the key preoccupations of multimodal interaction analysis is the fact that
when we are interacting we are almost always involved in multiple activities. We
might, for example, be chatting with a friend at the beauty salon, leafing though a
magazine and checking the mirror to see what is going on with our hair all at the
same time. Multimodal interaction analysis gives us a way to examine how
people use different communicative modes to manage simultaneous activities
and to communicate to others something about how they are distributing their
attention.

It is important to mention that both of these approaches have been applied to
both static texts and dynamic interactions. Approaches based on systemic
functional grammar have been used to analyze things like gestures and gaze, and
multimodal interaction analysis has been applied to more static texts like
advertisements. Furthermore, with the increasing popularity of interactive text-
based forms of communication like instant messaging, blogs and social
networking sites, discourse analysts often find that they need to focus both on
patterns and structures in the organization of elements in texts and on the
sequentiality and simultaneity of actions as people interact using these texts (see
for example Jones, 2005, 2009a, b).

As new forms of media are developed which allow people to mix modes of
communication in new ways over time and space, our whole idea of what we
mean by a text or a conversation is beginning to change. If, for example, as we
discussed in Section A2, texture is a result of elements like clauses, sentences and
paragraphs being connected together in various ways using cohesive devices,
then it would make sense to consider not just a particular webpage, but an entire
website consisting of numerous pages joined together by hyperlinks as a kind of
text. We might also be tempted to consider as part of this text other websites
that this text hyperlinks to, and, before long, following this logic, we might end
up with the idea that the entire Internet can on some level be considered a single
text.

Similarly, our notion of conversations is changing. Not only are computer
mediated conversations often written rather than spoken, but they may extend
over days or even months on discussion forums or Facebook walls, accompanied
by things like photos and video clips rather than gestures and facial expressions.
TM
Furthermore, conversations often travel across communication media and
modes. You might, for example, begin a conversation with a friend over lunch,

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continue it later in the afternoon using text messages, carry on chatting about the
same topic through the telephone or instant messaging in the evening, and
resume the conversation the next morning over coffee at Starbucks.

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 These changes brought on by multimedia present challenges for communicators
and discourse analysts alike. Because different modes (and media) alter the
kinds of meanings we can make, we need to learn to adjust our discourse in
different ways every time we move from one mode to another. This phenomenon
is known resemiotization the fact that the meanings that we make change as
they are shaped by the different modes we use as social practices unfold. The
author of a text based personal ad like those described in Section B3, for
example, might move on to exchange photographs with a potential partner, and
then to talking on the phone, and finally to a face-to-face meeting (see Jones
2005). The Australian discourse analyst Rick Iedema (2001) gives as an example
of resemiotization the way meanings associated with the building of a new wing
of a hospital changed as they were expressed orally in planning meetings, then
later in the written language of reports, and still later in the graphic language of
architectural drawings, and finally in the materiality of bricks and mortar.

The most important point multimodal discourse analyst makes is that modes can
never really be analyzed in isolation from other modes (although this is, as we
have seen in this book, what most discourse analysts do with the modes of
spoken and written language). Not only do modes always interact with other
modes in texts and interaction, but authors and conversational participants often
shift from foregrounding one mode or set of modes, to foregrounding other
modes or sets of modes, and in doing so, alter the meaning potential of the
communicative environment.

TM

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 A10 CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

So far all of the approaches to discourse analysis we have considered involve
analyzing a relatively small number of texts or interactions at one time. In fact,
the focus of most discourse analysis is on looking very closely at one or a small
number of texts or conversations of a particular type, trying to uncover things
like how the text or conversation is structured, how writers/speakers and
readers/listeners are constructed, how the text or conversation promotes the
broader ideological agendas of groups or institutions, and how people actually
use the text or conversation to perform concrete social actions.

Corpus-assisted discourse analysis is unique in that it allows us to go beyond
looking at a small number of texts or interactions to analyzing a large number of
them and being able to compare them to other texts and conversations that are
produced under similar or different circumstances. It also allows us to bring to
our analysis some degree of objectivity by giving us the opportunity to test out
the theories we have formulated in our close analysis of a few texts or
conversations on a much larger body of data in a rather systematic way.

A corpus is basically a collection of texts in digital format that it is possible to
search through and manipulate using a computer program. There are a number
of large corpora, such as the British National Corpus, which is a very general
collection of written and spoken texts in English. You can also find general
corpora of texts produced in different varieties of English and also other
languages. There are also a large number of specialized corpora available, that is,
collections of texts of one particular genre (such as business letters3) or in one
particular register (such as academic writing4). There are even multimodal
corpora in which not just verbal data but also visual data are collected and
tagged.

Normally, corpora are used by linguists in order to find out things about the
grammatical and lexical patterns in particular varieties of language or particular
kinds of texts. A lot of what we know about the differences among the different
varieties of English (such as British English, American English, and Australian
English) or among different registers for example comes from the analysis of
corpora. Corpora have also played an important role in forensic linguistics (the
use of linguistics to solve crimes): linguists sometimes, for example, compare the
features in a piece of writing to those in a corpora of texts by a particular author
in order to answer questions about authorship.

Discourse analysts have only recently started using corpora, and the number TMof
discourse analytical studies that rely heavily on corpora is still relatively small.

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3 See for example http://langbank.engl.polyu.edu.hk/corpus/business_correspondence.html

4 See for example the Lancaster Corpus of Academic Written English

http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/activities/294/

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 The reasons for this have to do with the way discourse analysts have
traditionally viewed what they do. As we said in the beginning of this book,
discourse analysts are not just interested in linguistic forms and patterns but
also in how language is actually used in concrete social situations. Computer
analysis using large corpora seems to go against this key aim: texts in corpora
are taken out of their social contexts, and even the information we often get from
the analysis, which usually consists of things like lists of frequently used words
or phrases, is often presented outside of the context of the texts in which these
words and phrases occur.

Other than this, the analysis of corpora also presents other problems for
discourse analysts. As we asserted at the beginning of our study of discourse
analysis: People dont always say what they mean, and people dont always
mean what they say. A big part of discourse analysis, in fact, is figuring out what
people mean when they do not say (or write) it directly. Any method which takes
language and its meaning at face value is of limited use to discourse analysts.
Words and phrases, as we have seen, can have multiple meanings depending on
how they are used in different circumstances by different people, and just
because a word is used frequently does not mean it is particularly important.
Often the most important meanings that we make are implicit or stated
indirectly.

Despite these potential problems, however, the computer-assisted analysis of
corpora can still be a very valuable tool for discourse analysts. The key word in
this phrase is assisted. The computer analysis of corpora cannot be used by itself
to do discourse analysis. But it can assist us in doing discourse analysis in some
very valuable ways.

First, it can help us to see the data that we are analyzing from a new perspective.
Often seeing your data broken down into things like concordances or frequency
lists can help you to see things that you missed using more traditional discourse
analytical techniques.

Second, it can help us to see if we can generalize our theories or observations
about certain kinds of texts or certain kinds of interactions. If you find certain
features in a business email you are analyzing, the most you can say is that this
particular email has these features and that these features function in the
particular social situation from which the email comes in a certain way. If,
however, you have access to a large number of similar emails, or emails from the
same company, then you can start to make generalizations about the kinds of
features that are common to business emails, or the kinds of features that are
common to emails in this particular company. This has obvious applications to
genre analysis in which the analyst is interested in identifying certain TM
conventions of language use associated with particular kinds of texts.

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Finally, and most importantly, the analysis of corpora can help us to detect what
we have been calling 'Discourses with a capital D' systems of language use that
promote particular kinds of ideologies and power relationships. One of the
biggest problems we have as discourse analysts is that, while we want to make

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 some kind of connection between the texts and conversations that we are
analyzing and larger Discourses such as the Discourse of medicine or the
Discourse or racism -- we are usually just guessing about whether or not these
Discourses actually exist and what kinds of ideologies, power relationships and
linguistic strategies they entail. These are usually quite educated guesses that we
make based on world knowledge, scholarly research, common sense and the
analysis of lots of different texts over a long period of time. The analysis of large
corpora, however, gives us a more empirical way to detect trends in language use
how words and phrases tend to reoccuracross a large number of texts, which
might signal a Discourse, and also to detect if and how such language use
changes over time (Baker, 2005; 2006).

The study by Baker and McEnery (2005) on the portrayal of refugees and asylum
seekers in public discourse, an excerpt of which is reprinted in Section D10, is a
good example of how corpus-assisted analysis can help to uncover patterns of
language use that point to the existence of different Discourses associated with
a particular issue. Other examples include Hardt-Mautners 1995 study of British
newspaper editorials on the European Union, Reys 2001 study of gender and
language in the popular U.S. television series Star Trek, and Bakers (2005) study
of various Discourses surrounding male homosexuality in Britain and America.

Of course, being able to detect Discourses through the computer analysis of
corpora requires the creative combination of multiple analytical procedures, and
it also necessarily involves a large amount of interpretative work by the analyst.
Corpus-assisted discourse analysis is not a science, it is an art, and perhaps the
biggest danger of employing it is that the analyst comes to see it as somehow
more scientific than the close analysis of texts just because computers and
quantification are involved. The computer analysis of corpora do not provide
discourse analysts with answers. Rather, they provide them with additional
information to make their educated guesses even more educated and their
theory building more evidence-based.

Theory or Method?

One of the differences between corpus-assisted discourse analysis and the other
approaches to discourse we have presented in this book is that, while
approaches like genre analysis, conversation analysis, and the ethnography of
communication each explicitly advance a particular theory of discourse, corpus-
assisted discourse analysis is often seen to be theory-neutral. That is, it is
viewed more as a method for assisting in the application of different theories.
Thus, one can use corpora in doing genre analysis, conversation analysis, TM
pragmatics, or critical discourse analysis.

Here however, it would be useful to recall some of the points we made in our

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discussion of mediated discourse analysis in Section A8 about the nature of
cultural tools. Since all tools make certain kinds of actions easier and others
more difficult, there is really no such thing as an ideologically-neutral tool. The

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 computer-assisted analysis of corpora has certain affordances and constraints
which make it more compatible with some approaches to discourse and less
compatible with others. In particular, while it seems especially suited for
approaches which concern themselves with the ways texts and conversations are
structured or patterned (like genre analysis and conversation analysis), it is
perhaps less suitable for approaches which focus more on the social context of
communication (like the ethnography of speaking).

TM

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SECTION B

DEVELOPMENT: APPROACHES TO
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

TM

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 B1 THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT DISCOURSE

Over the years people have approached the study of discourse in many different
ways, and throughout this book we will explore some of these ways of analyzing
discourse and practice applying them to texts and conversations from our own
lives. For now it is enough to say that people who analyze discourse have
basically gone about it from three different perspectives based on three different
definitions of what discourse is.

Some have taken a formal approach to discourse, defining it simply as language
above the level of the clause or sentence. Those working from this definition
often try to understand the kinds of rules and conventions that govern the ways
we join clauses and sentences together to make texts.

Others take a more functional approach, defining discourse as language in use.
This definition leads to questions about how people use language to do things
like make requests, issue warnings, and apologize in different kinds of situations
and how we interpret what other people are trying to do when they speak or
write.

Finally, there are those who take what we might call a social approach, defining
discourse as a kind of social practice. What is meant by this is that the way we
use language is tied up with the way we construct different social identities and
relationships and participate in different kinds of groups and institutions. It is
tied up with issues of what we believe to be right and wrong, who has power
over whom, and what we have to do and say to fit in to our societies in different
ways.

Although these three different approaches to discourse are often treated as
separate, and are certainly associated with different historical traditions and
different individual discourse analysts, the position we will be taking in this book
is that good discourse analysis requires that we take into account all three of
these perspectives. Instead of three separate definitions of discourse, they are
better seen as three interrelated aspects of discourse. The way people use
language cannot really be separated from the way it is put together, and the way
people use language to show who they are and what they believe cannot be
separated from the things people are using language to do in particular
situations.

Language above the clause TM

The use of the term discourse to mean language above the level of the sentence
or the clause probably originated with the linguist Zellig Harris, who, back in the

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1950s, wanted to take the study of linguistics to a new level. Before this, linguists
had come a long way in understanding how sounds are put together to form
words and how words are put together to form sentences. What Harris wanted

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 to do was to understand how sentences are put together to form texts.

The idea that texts could be analyzed in terms their formal structure was actually
very popular in the early and mid 20th century, even before Harris invented the
term discourse analysis, especially in the field of literature. One group of
literary critics called the Russian Formalists, for example, tried to apply the same
kinds of methods people used to analyze the grammar of sentences to analyzing
stories and novels. Perhaps the most famous was Vladimir Propp, who tried to
come up with a grammar of stories by studying Russian folk tales.

The method that Harris proposed for the analysis of discourse, which he called
distributional analysis, was not much different from how people go about doing
grammatical analysis. The idea was to identify particular linguistic features and
determine how they occurred in texts relative to other features, that is, which
features occurred next to other features or in the same environment with them.
However, as you will see from the excerpt from Harriss seminal paper reprinted
in Section D1, his ambitions went beyond simply understanding how linguistic
features are distributed throughout texts. He was also interested in
understanding how these features correlate with non-linguistic behavior beyond
texts, that is, how the form that texts take is related to the social situations in
which they occur. It was really left to discourse analysts who came after him,
however, to figure out exactly how the relationship between texts and the social
contexts in which they are used could be fruitfully studied.

When focusing on the formal aspect of discourse, we are mostly interested in
how the different elements of texts or conversations are put together to form
unified wholes. In this respect, we usually look for two kinds of things. We look
for linguistic features (words and grammar), which help to link different parts of
the text or conversation together, and we look at the overall pattern of the text or
conversation. As we said in Section A2, we can refer to these two things as 1)
cohesion (how pieces of the text are stuck together) and 2) coherence (the
overall pattern or sequence of elements in a text or conversation that conforms
to our expectations about how different kinds of texts or interactions ought to be
structured). We will deal with these two concepts in more detail in the Section
B2.

Language in use

The second aspect of discourse that discourse analysts focus on is how people
actually use language to get things done in specific contexts. In fact, as was
pointed out in Section A1, it is often very difficult to understand what a piece of
language means without referring to the social context in which it is being TM used
and what the person who is using it is trying to do.

This view of discourse grew out of the work of a number of important scholars

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including Michael Halliday, whose approach to the study of grammar differed
markedly from earlier approaches by focusing less on the forms language takes
and more on the social functions accomplished by language, and the work of the

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 British philosophers John L. Austin and Paul Grice who laid the foundation for
what we call pragmatics (the study of how people do things with language).
Another important figure who promoted this view of discourse is the applied
linguist H.G. Widdowson, who approached the whole problem of language use
from the perspective of language learning, noting that learning a foreign
language requires more than just learning how to make grammatical sentences;
it also involves being able to use the language to accomplish things in the world.

There are a number of ways to study language in use. One way is to consider
discourse itself as a kind of action, and to explore how, when we say things or
write things, we are actually doing things like apologizing, promising,
threatening or making requests (as we noted in Section A5). Another way to
consider language in use is to explore the role of discourse in certain kinds of
activities and to examine how different kinds of discourse make certain kinds of
actions or activities either easier or more difficult to perform (an idea we
elaborated on in Section A8). Finally, we might consider how people use
discourse strategically to try to communicate their interpretation of a situation
or to manage their relationships with the people with whom they are
communicating (as we discussed in Section A6).

Language and Social practice

The third aspect of discourse has to do with the role of language in social
practice. Language is seen not just as a system for making meaning, but as part
of larger systems through which people construct social identities and social
realities. Different people use language in different ways. An English teacher
talks differently than a hip-hop artist. And these different ways of talking help to
show who we are and also reflect our different ideas about the world, different
beliefs, and different values.

This view of discourse probably owes the most to the French philosopher Michel
Foucault, who argued that discourse is the main tool through which we construct
knowledge and exert power over other people. Different kinds of discourse (or
discourses) are associated with different kinds of people and different systems
of knowledge. Foucault spoke, for example, of clinical discourse, economic
discourse, the discourse of natural history, (and) psychiatric discourse (1972:
121). The American discourse analyst James Gee uses a capital D to distinguish
this view of discourse from the others we have talked about. For him,
Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate
words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities (1996: 127).

This aspect of discourse leads us to explore how people use language to advance TM
certain versions of reality and certain relationships of power, and also how our
beliefs, values and social institutions are constructed through and supported by
discourse. A central principle of this view of discourse is that discourse is always

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ideological, meaning that discourse always has an agenda, that it always ends
up serving the interests of certain people over those of others.

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 As was stated above, it is difficult to look at discourse in any meaningful way
from only one of these perspectives. Simply looking at how texts are put
together, for example, while it may be interesting, has limited practical value. At
the same time, you cannot really make broad statements about power or
ideology in a text without first understanding some basic things about how the
text is put together and how people are actually using it in specific social
contexts to perform specific actions.

Look deeper into this topic online

TM

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 B2 COHESION AND COHERENCE

Earlier we said that one of the most basic tasks for a discourse analyst is to
future out what makes a text a text and what makes a conversation and
conversation, in other words, to figure out what gives text and conversations
texture. Texture, we said, comes from cohesion and coherence. Cohesion primarily
has to do with linguistic features in the text, and coherence has to do with the
kind of framework with which the reader approaches the text and what he or
she wants to use the text to do.

This is perhaps a bit misleading, possibly making you think that, when it comes
to cohesion, the reader doesnt have to do any work, and in the case of coherence
the expectations in the mind of the reader are more important than what is
actually in the text. This is not the case. In fact, what creates cohesion is not just
the linguistic features within the text alone, but the fact that these features lead
readers to perform certain mental operations to locate and take note of earlier
or later parts of the text as they are going through it.

For example, if I were to say, Lady Gaga doesnt appeal to me, but my sister loves
her, in order to understand the meaning of her in the second clause, you have
to do some mental work. Not only do you need to refer back to the first clause,
you also have to be smart enough to know that her refers to Lady Gaga and not
my sister. Thus, cohesion is the quality in a text that forces you to look either
backward or forward in the text in order to make sense of the things you read,
and through your acts of looking backward and forward the text takes on a
quality of connectedness.

Similarly, to say that coherence is a matter of the frameworks or sets of

expectations that we bring to texts, does not mean that what is actually in the
text is any less important. Concrete features must exist in the text which are
often arranged in a certain order and conform to or trigger those expectations.
For example, for me to interpret a text as a shopping list, it must have a certain
structure (a list), certain kinds of words (generally nouns), and those words
must represent things that I am able to purchase (as opposed to abstract things
like world peace or unaffordable items like the Golden Gate Bridge).

Cohesion
TM
Halliday and Hasan, whose work is excerpted in Section D2, describe two broad
kinds of linguistic devices that are used to force readers to engage in this process
of backward and forward looking which gives them a sense of connectedness in

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texts. One type depends on grammar (which they call grammatical cohesion) and
the other type depends more on the meanings of words (which they call lexical
cohesion).

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Devices used to create grammatical cohesion include:

Conjunction (using connecting words)

Reference (using a pronoun to refer to another word)
Substitution (substituting one word or phrase for another word or
phrase)
Ellipses (leaving something out)

Lexical cohesion involves the repetition of words or of words from the same
semantic field (e.g. milk, tomatoes, rocket).

Conjunction refers to the use of various connecting words (such as conjunctions

like and and but and conjunctive adverbs like furthermore and however) to join
together clauses and sentences. Conjunction causes the reader to look back to
the first clause in a pair of joined clauses to make sense of the second clause. The
important thing about these connecting words is that they do not just establish
a relationship between the two clauses, but that they tell us what kind of
relationship it is.

Connecting words, then, can be grouped into different kinds depending on the
relationship they establish between the clauses or sentences that they join
together. Some are called additive, because they add information to the previous
clause or sentence. Examples are and, moreover, furthermore, in addition, as
well. Others are called contrastive because they set up some kind of contrast
with the previous sentence or clause. Examples are but, however. Still others
are called causative because they set up some kind of cause and effect
relationship between the two sentences or clauses. Examples of these are
because, consequently, therefore. Finally, some are called sequential because
they indicate the order facts or events come in. Examples are firstly,
subsequently, then and finally. In the two examples below, the first uses a
contrastive connective and the second uses a causative connective.

He liked the exchange students. She, however, would have nothing to do

with them.

He liked the exchange students. She, therefore, would have nothing to do

with them.

All connecting words cause the reader to look back to a previous clause (or
sentence) in order to understand the subsequent clause (or sentence), and the
kind of connecting word used guides the reader in understanding the
relationship between two clauses (or sentences). In the first example given TM
above, the word however causes the reader to look back at the first sentence to
find out what the difference is between her and him. In the second example, the
word therefore causes the reader to look back at the first sentence to find out

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why she wont have anything to do with the exchange students.

Another very common way we make our texts stick together is by using words
that refer to words we used elsewhere in the text. This kind of cohesive device is

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 known as reference. The two examples above, besides using connecting words,
also use this device. The word them in the second sentence refers back to the
exchange students in the first sentence, and so, to make sense of it, the reader is
forced to look back. He and she are also pronouns and presumably refer to
specific people who are probably named at an earlier point in the longer text
from which these sentences were taken. The word or group of words that a
pronoun refers to is called its antecedent. What reference does, then, is help the
reader to keep track of the various participants in the text as he or she reads
(Eggins, 1994: 95).

There are basically three kinds of reference: 1) anaphoric reference using

words that point back to a word used before:

After Lady Gaga appeared at the MTV Music Video Awards in a dress made
completely of meat, she was criticized by animal rights groups.

2) cataphoric reference: Using words that point forward to a word that has not
been used yet:

When she was challenged by reporters, Lady Gaga insisted that the dress
was not intended to offend anyone.

3) Using words that point to something outside the text (exophoric reference):

If you want to know more about this controversy, you can read the
comments people have left on animal rights blogs.

The definite article (the) can also be a form of anaphoric reference in that it
usually refers the reader back to an earlier mention of a particular noun.

Lady Gaga appeared in a dress made completely of meat. The dress was
designed by Franc Fernandez.

Substitution is similar to reference except rather than using pronouns, other

words are used to refer to an antecedent, which has either appeared earlier or
will appear later. In the sentence below, for example, the word one is used to
substitute for dress.

Besides wearing a meat dress, Lady Gaga has also worn a hair one, which
was designed by Chris March.

Substitution can also be used to refer to the verb or the entire predicate of a
clause, as in the example below.
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If Lady Gaga was intending to shock people, she succeeded in doing so.

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Ellipsis is the omission of a noun, verb, or phrase on the assumption that it is
understood from the linguistic context. In order to fill in the gap(s), readers need
to look back to previous clauses or sentences, as in the example below.

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 There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not
we, them. (Virginia Woolf)

All of the devices mentioned above are examples of grammatical cohesion, the
kind of cohesion that is created because of the grammatical relationship between
words. Lexical cohesion occurs as a result of the semantic relationship between
words. The simplest kind of lexical cohesion is when words are repeated. But a
more common kind is the repetition of words related to the same subject. We call
these chains of similar kinds of words that run through texts lexical chains. In
the following text, for example, besides the use of reference (who, it, she), the
clauses are held together by the repetition of the verb to wear and of other
words having to do with clothing and fashion (bikini, Vogue a famous fashion
magazine, dress, and outfits).

Lady Gaga, who came under fire recently for wearing a meat bikini on the
cover of Vogue Hommes Japan, wore a raw meat dress at last night's
VMAs. It was one of many outfits she wore throughout the night.
(Oldenberg, 2010)

Taken together, these words form a lexical chain, which helps to bind the text
together. Lexical chains not only make a text more cohesive but also highlight
the topic or topics (such as fashion, entertainment, technology) that the text is
about and so can provide context for determining the meaning of ambiguous
words (such as rocket in the example of the shopping list given in Section A2).
In fact, searching for lexical chains is one the main techniques used in computer
automated text categorization and summarization.

Some texts may make use of a lot of these devices, whereas others may use very
few of them. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 297) refer to texture in text as being
either tight meaning that there are many cohesive devices or loose,
meaning that there are fewer. What often determines the extent to which these
devices are used is how much they are needed for readers to make the kinds of
connections they need to make to understand the text. Communication generally
operates according to the principle of least effort. There is no need, for example,
for me to insert the word and after every item in my shopping list for me to
know that I need to buy tomatoes in addition to buying milk. One of the
challenges for people who are producing texts, therefore, is figuring out what
kinds of connections readers can make for themselves by invoking what they
already know about the world and about this particular kind of text (coherence)
and what connections need top be spelled out explicitly in the text (cohesion).

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Coherence

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As the shopping list we discussed in Section A2 illustrates, what makes a text a
text is often as much a matter of the interpretative framework that the reader
brings to the text as it is of anything internal to the text. The relationship

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 between the words tomatoes and rocket becomes meaningful to a reader
based on his or her understanding of what a shopping list is and what it is used
for. This aspect of texture is known as coherence, and it has to do with our
expectations about the way elements in a text ought to be organized and the
kinds of social actions (like shopping) that are associated with a given text.

The text below (Figure B2.1) is a good example of how we sometimes need to
apply our experience with past texts and with certain conventions that have
grown up in our society in order to understand new texts we encounter.

Figure B2.1 Advertisement from Body Coach.Net


For most people, as soon as they see the words before and after, a certain body
of knowledge is triggered based on texts they have seen in the past which
contain these words such as advertisements for beauty products. In such texts,
before is usually portrayed as bad and after is usually portrayed as good, and
the product being advertised is portrayed as the agent that causes the
transformation from before to after. This structure is a variation on what
Michael Hoey (1983) has called the Problem-Solution pattern, which underlies
many texts from business proposals to newspaper editorials.

The challenge this ad presents for the reader is that there is no explicit
information about what is meant by before and after other than a curved line
drawn down the center of the page. In order to interpret this line, we must make
reference to the smaller words in the lower right corner which give the name of
the advertiser: Body Coach.Net, and the slogan: For a perfect body. This TM
information creates for readers an interpretive framework based on their
knowledge of the kind of business such a company might be engaged in and

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cultural notions of what a perfect body might look like. Once this framework is
triggered, most readers have no trouble interpreting the space formed on the
before side of the ad as portraying the stomach of an overweight person, and
the space formed on the after side as the hourglass shape associated (at least

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 in the culture in which this ad appeared) with female beauty, and of the company
Body Coach.Net and the product that it sells as the agents of this
transformation.

There are a number of different kinds of interpretative frameworks that we use
to make sense of texts. One kind, which we will discuss further in the next
section, we might call a generic framework. This kind of framework is based on
the expectations we have about different kinds of texts, the kinds of information
we expect to encounter in texts of different kinds and the order in which we
expect that information to be presented, along with other kinds of lexical or
grammatical features we expect to encounter. In the example above, for instance,
it is partially our knowledge of the structure of before and after ads that helps
us to make sense of this particular ad.

Part of what forms such generic frameworks is that different parts of a text are
not just grammatically and lexically related, but that they are conceptually and
procedurally related in other words, that they appear in a certain logical or
predictable sequence. Texts following the Problem Solution pattern, for
example, begin by presenting a problem and then go on to present one or more
solutions to the problem. This important principle in discourse analysis has its
origins largely in cognitive science and early research in artificial intelligence by
people like Schank and Abelson (1977), who pointed out that many human
activities are governed by conventional, sequentially ordered, multi-step
procedures (which they called scripts), and Rumelhart, (1975), who pointed out
that, in a similar way, texts like narratives also exhibit conventional structures
based on predictable sequences of actions and information (which he called
schema). An excerpt from Rumelharts classic article Notes on a Schema for
Stories is reprinted in Section D2.

But not all of the knowledge we use to make sense of texts comes from our
knowledge about the conventions associated with different kinds of texts. Some
of this knowledge is part of larger conceptual frameworks that we build up based
on our understanding of how the world works. We will use the term cultural
models to describe these frameworks. James Paul Gee (2010) calls cultural
models videotapes in the mind based on experiences we have had and depicting
what we take to be prototypical (or normal) people, objects and events. To
illustrate the concept he points out that we would never refer to the Pope as a
bachelor, even though the Pope, as an unmarried adult male, fulfills the
conditions for the dictionary definition of the word, because he does not fit into
our cultural model of what a bachelor is.

Cultural models regarding both the kind of work coaches do and about what
constitutes a perfect body are central to our ability to interpret the ad above,
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and especially for our understanding of the meaning of the two shapes formed by
the line drawn down the center of the page.

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The important thing to remember about cultural models (and, for that matter,
generic frameworks) is that they are cultural. In other words, they reflect the
beliefs and values of a particular group of people in a particular place at a

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 particular point in history. The ad reprinted above would be totally
incomprehensible for people in many societies outside of our own because they
would not share either the knowledge of before and after ads or the beliefs
about physical attractiveness that we have. It is even more important to
remember that such texts do not just reflect such expectations, values and
beliefs, but also reinforce them. Every time we encounter a text like the one
above, these generic frameworks and cultural models and the habitual ways of
looking at the world associated with them are strengthened.

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 B3 ALL THE RIGHT MOVES

Texts that are structured according to particular generic frameworks are called
genres. But, as we noted in Section A3, genres are more than just texts; they are
means by which people get things done, and the way they are structured depends
crucially on what the particular people using a genre want or need to do. In other
words, what determines the way a particular genre is put together is its
communicative purpose, and so this must be our central focus in analyzing
genres.

Usually, the overall communicative purpose of a genre can be broken down into
a number of steps that users need to follow in order to achieve the desired
purpose rather like the steps in a recipe and typically the most important
constraints and conventions regarding how a genre is structured involve 1)
which steps must be included, and 2) the order in which they should appear. In
the field of genre analysis these steps are known as moves.

John Swales, the father of genre analysis, illustrated the idea of moves in his
analysis of introductions to academic articles. Instead of asking the traditional
question: how is this text structured?, Swales asked What do writers of such
texts need to do in order to achieve their desired purpose? (which, in the case of
an introduction to an academic article, is mainly getting people to believe that
the article is worth reading). In answering this question, Swales identified four
moves characteristic of such texts. An introduction to an academic article, he said,
typically:

1. Establishes the field in which the writer of the study is working;
2. Summarizes the related research or interpretations on one aspect of
the field;
3. Creates a research space or interpretive space (a niche) for the
present study by indicating a gap in current knowledge or by raising
questions; and
4. Introduces the study by indicating what the investigation being
reported will accomplish for the field. (adapted from Swales 1990)

Of course, not all introductions to academic articles contain all four of these
moves in exactly the order presented by Swales. Some article introductions may
contain only some of these moves, and some might contain different moves.
Furthermore, the ways these moves are realized might be very different for
articles about engineering and articles about English literature. The point that
Swales was trying to make, however, was not that these moves are universal TMor
in some way obligatory, but that these are the prototypical moves one would
expect to occur in this genre, and understanding these default expectations is the

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first step to understanding how expert users might creatively flout these
conventions.

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 At the same time, it is important to remember that not all genres are equally
conventionalized; while some genres have very strict rules about which moves
should be included and what order they should be in, other genres exhibit much
more variety (see for example the weblog entries discussed Section C3).

One genre which has a particularly consistent set of communicative moves is the
genre of the personal advertisement (sometimes called the dating
advertisement) which sometimes appears in the classified sections of
newspapers and, increasingly, on online social media and dating sites. The
following is an example given by Justine Coupland in her 1996 study of dating
advertisement in British newspapers:

Sensual, imaginative brunette, 25, artistic, intelligent, with a sense of
humour. Enjoys home life, cooking, sports, country life. No ties, own
home. Seeking a tall, strong, intelligent fun companion with inner depth
for passionate, loving romance, 25-35. Photo guarantees reply. Must feel
able to love Ben my dog too. London/anywhere. (Coupland, 1996: 187)

Advertisements like this tend to consist of five moves:

1) The advertiser describes himself or herself (Sensual, imaginative
brunette);
2) The advertiser describes the kind of person he or she is looking for
(Seeking tall, strong, intelligent);
3) The advertiser describes the kind of relationship or activities he or
she wishes to engage in with the target (for passionate, loving romance);
4) The advertiser gives additional information, makes a humorous remark
or issues a challenge (Photo guarantees reply. Must feel able to love Ben my
dog too); and
5) The advertiser indicates how he or she can be contacted (by, for
example, giving a telephone number, an email address, or a post office box
this move is not present in the excerpt Coupland gives, but was
presumably present in some form in the original ad).

Of course, as we will see below, dating ads in other contexts might have slightly
different move structures, but all of these moves will likely be present in one
form or another. The reason for this is that these moves (especially 1, 2, 3, and 5)
are essential if the overall communicative purpose of finding a partner is to be
achieved.

Such ads also tend to have certain regularities in style and the kinds of language
that is used to realize these five moves. If they appear in newspapers, for
example, they are often written in a kind of telegraphic style, which omits n TMon-
essential function words (since advertisers usually have a word limit or are
charged by the word). In most cases, self-descriptions and other-descriptions
contain information about things like age, appearance, and personality expressed

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in lists of positive adjectives (like young, fit, fun-loving), and the goal is almost
always a romantic or sexual relationship or activities (like opera, candlelight

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 dinners, quiet evenings at home) which are normally associated with or act as
euphemisms for sex or romance.

In a sense, such advertisements not only serve the communicative purpose of
individual members of a discourse community to find suitable partners, but they
also serve to define and reinforce the values of the discourse community as a
whole regarding what kinds of partners and activities are considered desirable.
Therefore, being able to compose such ads successfully is not just about
portraying oneself as desirable, but also about portraying oneself as a competent
member of a particular community of users.

Of course, many different kinds of discourse communities use this genre for
different purposes, and so one might identify sub-genres of the personal
advertisement for communities of heterosexual singles, gay men, seniors, and
any number of other groups, each with different conventions and constraints on
what kind of information should be included and how it should be structured.
One such sub-genre is the matrimonial advertisement found in communities of
South Asians, an example of which is given below:

A well-settled uncle invites matrimonial correspondence from slim, fair,
educated South Indian girl, for his nephew, 25 years, smart, M.B.A., green
card holder, 56". Full particulars with returnable photo appreciated. (Nanda,
2000: 196-204)

The most obvious difference in this ad from the first example given is that the
advertiser is not the person who will be engaging in the sought after
relationship, but rather a family member acting as an intermediary. Another
important difference has to do with the kinds of information included in the
descriptions. Ads of this sub-genre often include information such as
immigration status, educational attainment, income, caste, and religion,
information that is not a common feature of dating ads in other communities.
Another rather unique sub-genre of personal ads are ads placed by lesbians in
search of reproductive partners, such as those examined by Susan Hogben and
Justine Coupland in their 2000 study. Here is an example of such an ad:

Loving, stable lesbian couple require donor. Involvement encouraged but
not essential. HIV test required. London. BoxPS34Q. (Hogben and
Coupland 2000: 464)

What is interesting about this ad and many of those like it is that there is no
elaborate description of the kind of person sought or what he or she is sought for
beyond the use of the term donor, a term which, in this community, presumably
communicates all of the necessary information. Another interesting aspect TM of this
sub-genre is that the commenting move, a move which in typical heterosexual
dating ads is usually of the least consequence, in these ads often includes vital

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information about legal and health issues that are central to the practice of
surrogate parenthood.

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 The most important point we can take from these two examples is that generic
variation is not just a matter of the different values or styles of different
discourse communities, but is also very often a function of differences in the
overall communicative purpose of the sub-genre (finding a sexual partner, a wife,
a reproductive partner).

Bending and Blending

Despite the stylistic variety in personal advertisements among different
discourse communities, this genre nevertheless remains very conventionalized,
with fairly strict constraints on what is considered a relevant contribution.
Advertisers must describe themselves, describe the kind of person they are
seeking, and describe the kind of relationship they want to have. Ironically,
however, the strongly conventionalized nature of this genre, the fact that nearly
all examples of it have more or less the same structure, has the potential to work
against the overall communicative purpose, which is attracting the attention of
interested (and interesting) readers. Consequently, it is not uncommon for
expert users of this genre to try to make their ads stand out by playing with the
conventions of the genre.

One way of playing with generic conventions, which Bhatia (1997) calls, genre
bending, involves flouting the conventions of a genre in subtle ways which, while
not altering the move structure substantially, makes a particular realization of a
genre seem creative or unique. One way writers of personal advertisements
sometimes bend this genre is by flouting the expectations for self-
aggrandizement associated with it. The following example comes from a study by
Jones on gay personal ads in Hong Kong:

CHINESE, 20, STILL YOUNG, but not good-looking, not attractive, not sexy,
not hairy, not fit, not tall, not experienced, not mature, not very intelligent
but Thoughtful and Sincere, looking for friendship and love. (Jones 2000:
46)

Another way of playing with generic conventions is to mix the conventions of
one genre with another, a process which Bhatia (1997) refers to as genre
blending. In the following example from Couplands study, for instance, the
advertiser blends the conventions of the dating ad genre with the conventions of
another genre, namely ads for automobiles.

CLASSIC LADY limousine, mint condition, excellent runner for years seeks
gentleman enthusiast 45+ for TLC and excursions in the Exeter area BOX
555L. (Coupland 1996: 192) TM

Ironically, what both of these writers are doing by flouting the conventions of the
genre is subtly distancing themselves from the discourse community of users

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while at the same time identifying with it. This seemingly odd strategy is less
surprising when one considers that most people who post such ads feel some
ambivalence about identifying themselves as members of the community of

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 people who have resorted to such means to find a partner. By playing with the
genre they succeed in resisting the commodifying nature of the genre (Coupland
1996) and humanizing themselves, one through modesty, and the other through
humor. It is a way of saying, even though I am posting a personal ad, I am not the
usual kind of person who posts such ads.

While membership in other discourse communities does not usually involve the
same kind of ambivalence, tactical aspects of using genres like bending and
blending are common in nearly all communities, and, indeed, are often markers
of users expertise. Of course, in order for blending to be effective it must result
in some sort of enhancement that contributes to the overall communicative
purpose being achieved more effectively or more efficiently. Similarly, when
bending a genre, one must be careful not to bend it to the point of breaking.
Whether a particular use of a genre is considered a creative innovation or an
embarrassing failure is ultimately a matter of whether or not the original
communicative purpose of the genre is achieved.


Modes, Media and Context

A number of other important factors determine how genres are used and how
they change. One, which we deal with in more detail in a later Sections A9 and
B9, has to do with the different modes (e.g. writing, graphics, video) that are
available for constructing the genre. Another, which we will discuss in Section
B8, has to do with the media through which genres are produced and distributed.

Both of these factors are important in relation to the genre we have been
discussing, personal advertisements, given the fact that recently this genre has,
to a large extent, migrated online. Nowadays it is more likely that one would
encounter such an advertisement on the Internet than in a newspaper. As a
result of this migration, the genre itself has changed dramatically.
First, it has changed in terms of the different modes that are available to users to
realize the moves discussed above. Because it is so easy to upload digital
photographs and even video, self-descriptions in online personal advertisements
are not dependent on text alone.

Second, websites that host such advertisements often require users to fill out
web forms, which specify exactly which information should be included and
render that information in a predetermined format. Such standardization leads
to more uniformity, but also makes it easier for users to electronically search
through thousands of ads using keywords.
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Third, Internet-based dating advertisements include all kinds of ways for the
advertiser and target to interact, including sending online messages, engaging in
real-time video chat, or exchanging forms of communication unique to this

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medium like virtual kisses, pokes and hugs, winks and hearts (see Jones
2009a).

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 Finally, with the development of mobile technologies, users of such genres can
access them anywhere through their mobile phones and use GPS tools to search
for suitable partners within a certain radius of their present location.
The point is that genres inevitably change, either because the communicative
goals of users change or because technologies for the production or distribution
of texts introduce new, more efficient ways of fulfilling old communicative goals.
Every time a genre changes, however, new sets of conventions and constraints
are introduced, and users need to invent new ways to operate strategically
within these constraints and to bend or blend the genre in creative ways.

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 B4 CONSTRUCTING REALITY

Participants and Processes

The main ways authors of texts promote ideologies is by constructing for us
versions of reality in which certain kinds of participants are excluded, and those
that are included are linked to each other in certain relationships, often based on
the actions they are portrayed as engaging in (which we have called processes).

Different kinds of processes link participants in different ways. As we have seen,
processes involving some kind of physical action often link participants in ways
in which one participant is portrayed as doing something to or for the other.
Processes involving saying or writing, on the other hand, often link participants
in ways in which one participant takes the position of the speaker or writer and
the other takes the position of the listener or reader. Processes involving
thinking and feeling usually link participants to ideas or emotions.

Participants can also be linked in various ways that show their relationship with
each other: they might be portrayed as equal or equivalent with linking verbs
like to be or to seem (as in this ice-cream is my dinner); one participant might
be portrayed as possessing another with words like to have or to contain (as in
this ice-cream contains nuts); and participants might be linked to each other in
other kinds of relationship like cause and effect with words like to cause, to
lead to, or to result in (as in ice-cream leads to obesity).

Finally, processes themselves can sometimes be transformed into participants
and linked to other participants or other processes (as in eating ice-cream
caused my divorce). In this last example, one process, the action of eating ice
cream, is linked in a cause and effect relationship with another process, the
speakers getting divorced from his or her spouse. Turning a process into a
participant is known as nominalization and is often a characteristic of technical
or academic texts.

One example of how participants and processes can be combined in texts to
create certain versions of reality can be found in the warning labels that most
governments require appear on cigarette packets. These requirements did not
always exist, and when the U.S. government first instituted them in 1966, there
was fierce negotiation between legislators and tobacco companies, who at that
time still had considerable influence with the government on how the warnings
should be worded. The first warning labels that appeared on cigarettes in tTM he U.S.
read:

Caution: Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health

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Here, the process type used is relational (to be), linking the nominalized process
of smoking cigarettes to a possible attribute: hazardousness. This link is

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 weakened by the use of the modal verb may, which reduces the certainty of the
statement. One can almost hear the voice of the government competing with the
voice of the tobacco companies in this statement, the one working to claim that
cigarette smoking is risky and the other working to undermine this claim.
In 1970, the U.S. Congress passed new legislation, which revised the warning to
read:

Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Cigarette Smoking is
Dangerous to Your Health

The first difference we can notice about this statement is that it is now
characterized as a warning rather than just a caution. The second thing we can
notice is that the participants and processes have changed. Now the main
participant is no longer the nominalized process of cigarette smoking but a
person, the Surgeon General, the chief medical officer of the United States,
engaged in a mental process, that of determining. The statement in the previous
warning about cigarettes being hazardous has itself become a participant, the
thing that the surgeon general has determined, and has been slightly modified,
the relational link becoming more certain (is rather than may be), and the
attribute changed to dangerous. On the one hand, it is easy to see how this
warning is in some ways stronger than the previous one: dangerous seems
more serious than hazardous and the voice of the Surgeon General seems to add
authority to the statement. On the other hand, the statement about the risk of
cigarette smoking is no longer the main clause of the sentence, but has been
demoted to the status of a participant. In other words, while the previous
warning was about cigarette smoking and its hazardousness, this sentence is
about the Surgeon General and what he (at the time, a man) had determined.
In 1985, the warning label was again changed to read:

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart
Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.

Here, the main participant is once again the nominalized process smoking, but a
new process has been introduced, the process of causing. This process is also a
relational one, but it portrays a different kind of relationship. Rather than simply
talking about an attribute of smoking, it places smoking in a cause and effect
relationship with a number of serious diseases (lung cancer, heart disease and
emphysema). Smokings relationship with pregnancy, however, is more
uncertain. First, the modal verb may weakens the relationship created by the
process. Second, the process itself, also one of causation (complicate means to
cause to be complicated), is much more vague. It is uncertain exactly how
pregnancy might be made complicated and what the implications of that might
be. TM

It is interesting to note that the cigarette warnings mandated by the government

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in the United States, the country where most to the worlds biggest tobacco
companies are based, tend to portray cigarettes as either having certain
attributes (being harmful) or being in certain other kinds of relationships with
other participants rather than doing things to people. Although cause may seem

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 to be about doing something, it is actually more about the relationship between
two things, one thing leading to another thing. Warnings used in other countries,
on the other hand, often use action processes. One warning used in Australia,
for example is:

Smoking harms unborn babies

Here smoking is portrayed as doing something (harming) to someone (unborn
babies). Similarly, since 2003, cigarettes in the European Union have carried
warnings like:

Smoking seriously harms you and others around you

Smoking while pregnant harms your child

and the direct and unambiguous statement:

Smoking Kills

In the examples above it is clear how the use of different kinds of participants
and processes constructs very different versions of the risk of cigarette smoking.
At the same time, it is important to caution that searching for ideology in texts is
usually not simple or straightforward. One cannot, for example, say that certain
process types or other grammatical features like nominalization always result in
certain kinds of effects. Rather, grammar is a resource that authors draw upon to
represent reality in particular ways.

Constructing Relationships

Constructing reality is not just a matter of representing what is going on. It is
also a matter of the author of a text constructing a certain kind of relationship
with the reader or listener and communicating something about the relevance of
what is going on to him or her. As stated before, one way this is done is to use the
languages system of modality. The use of the modal verb may in the statement
Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health, for example, creates in the
reader some doubt about the certainty of the statement.

Another way authors might construct a relationship with readers is through the
use of pronouns like you and we. By using the possessive pronoun your in the
above statement, for example, the authors of the statement make the potential
hazardousness of cigarette smoking relevant to readers. Similarly, the
statement, Smoking seriously harms you and others around you makes the TM
harm of cigarettes directly relevant by making the reader a participant in the
statement and, particularly, the participant to which the act of harming is being
done. This statement also constructs readers as socially responsible by implying

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that they would not only wish to avoid harm to themselves, but also harm to
those around them. An even more striking example of this technique can be seen
in the Australian warning label below:

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Protect children: don't make them breathe your smoke

In this example the message is also personalized by making the reader a
participant. In contrast to the warning above, however, which positions the
reader as a victim of cigarette smoking, this warning positions the reader as the
potential agent of harm, making children breathe smoke which is explicitly
portrayed as belonging to him or her.

Finally, texts create relationships between authors and readers through the use
of what we have been calling social languages. Consider the two examples
below.

1) Smoking when pregnant harms your baby (European Union)

2) SURGEON GENERALS WARNING: Smoking By Pregnant Women May
Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight (United
States)

Both of these examples are about the same thing: smoking by pregnant women.
This first text, however, constructs a reader who is herself a pregnant woman,
whereas the second constructs a reader who, while he or she may be interested
in pregnant women, may not be one. Furthermore, the first example uses
common, everyday language and few nominalizations, constructing the author as
a person not so different from the reader, someone akin to a friend or a relative.

The second example, on the other hand, uses very dense scientific language and
nominalizations like fetal injury in which the process of harming from the first
example is transformed into a noun, and the participant your baby is
transformed into an adjective modifying that noun (fetal). This sort of language
constructs the author as some kind of expert, perhaps a doctor or a research
scientist, and creates a considerable distance between him or her and the reader.

As can be seen from these examples, social languages and other interpersonal
aspects of texts work to portray the authors of the texts as certain kinds of
people and also construct readers of the texts as certain kinds of people. Another
way to say this is that texts make available certain reading positions (Hodge and
Kress, 1988) that situate readers in relation to the authors of the text, the topic
that the text deals with, and other people or institutions relevant to the topic.
The extent to which readers are able and willing to occupy these reading
positions helps to determine the kind of ideological effect the texts will have.

While the kind of textual analysis illustrated here can tell us something about TM the
versions of reality that texts construct and about the kinds of reading positions
they make available, it is impossible to say for certain just by analyzing texts

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what their actual effect will be on readers. Some pregnant women, for example,
might respond more readily to the plain familiar language and the personal
approach in example 1 above. Others might be more persuaded by the
authoritative voice of example 2.

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To really understand how people actually interpret texts, or, for that matter, how
ideologies end up finding their way into texts in the first place, it is necessary to
go beyond texts themselves and analyze both discourse practices, the practices
authors engage in when creating texts and the practices readers engage in when
interpreting them, and social practices, the activities, norms, and social
relationships that make up readers social worlds.

The more we know about the negotiations that went on between big tobacco
companies and politicians in the United States in the late 1960s, for example, the
better we can understand why early cigarette warnings were worded the way
they were; and the more we understand readers experiences of and knowledge
about smoking and the status of smoking in their circle of acquaintances, the
better we will be able to understand the effects warnings on cigarette packages
might have had on their behavior, For this reason, people who are interested in
studying ideology in discourse, known as critical discourse analysts, are
increasingly supplementing textual analysis with more ethnographic research
techniques like interviews, observations, and historical research.

TM

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 B5 THE TEXTURE OF TALK

In our analysis of how people make sense of written texts, we introduced the
concept of texture. Texture, we said, basically comes from two things: the ways
different parts of a text are related to one another, and the various expectations
that people have about texts. Making sense of conversations also involves these
two aspects of communication: the structure and patterning of the
communication and the broader expectations about meaning and human
behavior that participants bring to it. Generally speaking, conversation analysis
focuses more on the first aspect, and pragmatics focuses more on the second.
The basis of pragmatics is the idea that people enter into conversations with the
assumption that the people they are conversing with will behave in a logical way.
The philosopher Herbert Paul Grice called this assumption the cooperative
principle. When people engage in conversation, he said, they do so with the idea
that people will:

Make (their) conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at
which it is occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange
in which you are engaged. (Grice 1975: 45)

What he meant by this was that when people talk with each other they generally
cooperate in making their utterances understandable by conforming to what
they believe to be the other persons expectations about how people usually
behave in conversation. Most people, he said, have four main expectations about
conversational behavior:

1. That what people say will be true (the maxim of quality)
2. That what people say will be relevant to the topic under discussion (the
maxim of relevance)
3. That people will try to make what they mean clear and unambiguous
(the maxim of manner)
4. That people will say as much as they need to say to express their
meaning and not say more that they need to say (the maxim of quantity)

Grice called these four expectations maxims. Maxims are not rules that must be
followed; rather, they are general statements of principle about how things
should be done. In actual conversations, however, people often violate or flout
these maxims: they say things that are not true; they make seemingly irrelevant
statements; they are not always clear about what they mean; and they
sometimes say more than they need to or not enough to fully express their
meaning. The point that Grice was making was not that people always follow TMor
even that they should follow these maxims, but that when they do not follow
them, they usually do so for a reason: the very fact that they have flouted a

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maxim itself creates meaning, a special type of meaning known as implicature,
which involves implying or suggesting something without having to directly
express it. When people try to make sense of what others have said, they do so
against the background of these default expectations. When speakers do not

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 behave as expected, listeners logically conclude that they are trying to imply
something indirectly and try to work out what it is.

If your friend asks you if you think her new boyfriend is good looking, but you do
not think he is, you might say something like, He has a lovely personality,
violating the maxim of relevance (her question was about his appearance, not his
personality), or you might say something rather vague which communicates that
you do not think he is very good looking but which avoids saying this explicitly,
violating the maxim of manner.

The obvious question is, why do people do this? Why dont they simply
communicate what they mean directly? One reason is that implicature allows us
to manage the interpersonal aspect of communication. We might, for example,
use implicature to be more polite or avoid hurting someones feelings. We might
also use implicature to avoid making ourselves too accountable for what we have
said -- in other words, to say something without really saying it.

Of course, the fact that someone says something that is not true or is not entirely
clear does not necessarily mean they are creating implicature. Sometimes people
simply lie. You might, for example, tell your friend that you think her boyfriend is
very handsome. In this case, you have not created any indirect meaning. Your
meaning is very direct. It is just not true. Another example can be seen in the
often-quoted exchange below:

A Does your dog bite?
B No.
A [Bends down to stroke it and gets bitten] Ow! You said your dog
doesnt bite.
B That isnt my dog.

Here A has violated the maxim of quantity by saying too little, but, in doing so, he
has not created implicature. He has simply said too little. And so for the flouting
of a maxim to be meaningful, it must be done within the overall framework of the
cooperative principle. The person flouting a maxim must expect that the other
person will realize that they are flouting the maxim and that the meaning created
by this is not too difficult to figure out.

How we do things with words

Another important aspect of pragmatics concerns how people accomplish
various social actions when they talk, such as requesting, promising and TM
threatening. The philosopher John Austin pointed out that certain utterances,
when they are spoken, have the effect of actually performing some action in the
physical world. When the officiant at a wedding ceremony, for example, says, I

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now pronounce you husband and wife, it is by this pronouncement that the
couple becomes married, or when a judge says, I sentence you to five years in

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 prison, it is by this utterance that the person to whom this is uttered is
sentenced. Austin called these kinds of utterances performatives.

While Austins insight might seem rather obvious now, it was quite revolutionary
at the time he was writing, when most philosophers of language were mainly
focused on analyzing sentences in terms of whether or not they were true.
Austin pointed out that, for many utterances, their truth value is not as
important as whether or not they are able to perform the action they are
intended to perform.

The more Austin thought about this idea of performatives, the more he realized
that many utterances not just those containing phrases like I pronounce
and I declare and I command... have a performative function. If somebody
says to you, Cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health, for example, he or
she is usually not just making a statement. He or she is also doing something, that
is, warning you not to smoke.

Austin called these utterances that perform actions speech acts. The important
thing about these kinds of utterances, he said, is not so much their meaning as
their force, their ability to perform actions. All speech acts have three kinds of
force: locutionary force, the force of what the words actually mean, illocutionary
force, the force of the action the words are intended to perform, and
perlocutionary force, the force of the actual effect of the words on listeners.

One of the problems with analyzing speech acts is that, for many of the same
reasons speakers express meanings indirectly by flouting conversational
maxims, they also express speech acts indirectly. In other words, the locutionary
force of their speech act (the meaning of the words) might be very different from
the illocutionary force (what they are actually doing with their words). We have
already discussed a number of examples of this, such as the question Do you
have a pen? uttered to perform the act of requesting.

And so the problem is, how do we figure out what people are trying to do with
their words? For Austin, the main way we do this is by logically analyzing the
conditions under which a particular utterance is produced. He called the ability
of an utterance to perform a particular action the felicity (or happiness) of the
utterance, and in order for speech acts to be happy, certain kinds of conditions
must be met, which Austin called felicity conditions.

Some of these conditions relate to what is said. For some speech acts to be
felicitous, for example, they must be uttered in a certain conventional way. The
officiant at a wedding must say something very close to I now pronounce you
husband and wife in order for this to be a pronouncement of marriage. Some TM of
the conditions have to do with who utters the speech act the kind of authority
or identity they have. Only someone specially empowered to do so, for instance,

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is able to perform marriages. If a random person walked up to you and your
companion on the street and said, I now pronounce you husband and wife, this
would not be considered a felicitous pronouncement of marriage. Some of these
conditions concern the person or people to whom the utterance is addressed.

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 They must generally be able to decipher the speech act and comply with it.
People under a certain age, for example, cannot get married, and so the
pronouncement of marriage given above would not succeed as a speech act.
Similarly, if the two people to whom this pronouncement is uttered are not
willing to get married, the pronouncement would also lack felicity. Finally, some
of these conditions may have to do with the time or place the utterance is issued.
Captains of ships, for example, are only empowered to make pronouncements of
marriage aboard their ships.

And so, according to Austin and his followers, the main way we figure out what
people are trying to do when they speak to us is by trying to match the
conditions in which an utterance is made to the conditions necessary for
particular kinds of speech acts. So, when somebody comes up to me in a bar and
says, Hey mate, I suggest you leave my girlfriend alone, I use my logic to try to
figure out what he is doing and what he is trying to get me to do. At first I might
think that he is making a suggestion to me. But, when I consider the conditions of
the situation, I realize that this utterance does not fulfill the necessary conditions
of a suggestion, one of which is that whether or not I follow the suggestion is
optional. I can tell quite clearly from the expression on this fellows face that
what he is suggesting is not optional. I also realize that there will probably be
unpleasant consequences for me should I fail to comply. Given this condition, I
can only conclude that what he is doing with his words is not making a
suggestion but issuing a threat.

The important thing about this example is that I must use both of the tools
introduced above. I must make use of the cooperative principle to realize that he
is flouting the maxim of quality (he is not making a suggestion) and that there
must be some reason for this, and I must be able to analyze the conditions in
which this utterance is made to figure out what the speaker is actually trying to
do.


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Sense and sequencing: Conversation analysis

Whereas pragmatics begins with the assumption that conversations are logical,
conversation analysis begins with the assumption that they are orderly. What
orderly means is that they follow a certain predictable pattern, with some kinds
of utterances necessarily coming before or following other kinds of utterances.
Conversation analysts also see utterances as actions. Where they differ is in their
TM
ideas about how we interpret these actions what gives force to our words.
Whereas followers of Austin consider the speakers intentions and the conditions
under which the words are uttered to be the most important things,

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conversation analysts consider the utterance that occurred prior to the utterance
in question, and the one that occurs afterwards to be more important. In other
words, they believe we interpret utterances chiefly based on how they fit
sequentially with other utterances in a conversation.

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The core of conversation analysis, then, is the exploration of the sequential
structure of conversation. According to Schegloff and Sacks (1973), social
interaction is often arranged in pairs of utterances what one person says
basically determines what the next person can say. They call these sequences of
paired actions adjacency pairs. Examples of common adjacency pairs are
'question/answer', 'invitation/acceptance, and 'greeting/greeting'.

The most important thing about the two utterances that make up an adjacency
pair is that they have a relationship of conditional relevance. In other words, one
utterance is dependent on (conditioned by) the other utterance. The first
utterance determines what the second utterance can be (a question, for example,
should be followed by an answer, and a greeting should be followed by a
greeting). In the same way, the second utterance also determines what the first
utterance has been understood to be. If I have given you an answer, this provides
evidence that I have taken your preceding utterance to be a question. This is a
very big difference between conversation analysis and the speech act theory of
Austin. For speech act theory, the conditions for whether or not an utterance is a
particular speech act include things like the intentions and identities of the
speakers and the context of the situation. For conversation analysts, the
conditions that determine how an utterance should be interpreted must exist
within the conversation itself.

At the same time, conversation analysis also focuses on how speakers make use
of the default expectations people bring to conversations in order to make
meaning. The main difference is that important expectations are not so much
about the content of utterances (whether or not, for example, they are true or
clear), but rather about the structure of conversation, and particularly the ways
that utterances should fit with previous utterances. The idea behind adjacency
pairs is that when one person says something, he or she creates a 'slot' for the
next person to fill in in a particular way. If they fill it in in the expected way, this
is called a 'preferred response'. If they do not fill in this slot in the expected way,
their interlocutor hears the preferred response as being officially absent. As
Schegloff (1968: 1083) put it:

Given the first, the second is expectable. Upon its occurrence, it can be
seen to be the second item to the first. Upon its non-occurrence, it can be
seen to be officially absent.

Take for example the following exchange between a woman and her boyfriend:

A: I love you.
B: Thank you. TM

The reason this exchange seems odd to us, and undoubtedly seems odd to A, is

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that the preferred response to an expression of love is a reciprocal expression of
love. When this response is not given, it creates implicature. Thus, the most
important thing about Bs response is not the meaning that he expresses
(gratitude), but the meaning that is absent from the utterance.

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All first utterances in adjacency pairs are said to have a preferred second
utterance. For example, the preferred response to an invitation is an acceptance.
The preferred response to a greeting is a greeting. What makes a preferred
response preferred is not that the person who offered the first utterance would
prefer this response (the preferred response for an accusation, for example, is a
denial), but rather that this is the response which usually requires the least
additional conversational work. So the preferred response is the most efficient
response. When we issue dispreferred responses, we often have to add
something to them in order to avoid producing unintended implicature. For
example, if you ask me to come to your party and I accept your invitation, all I
have to do is say Sure! But if I want to refuse the invitation, I cannot just say
No! If I do, I create the implicature that I do not much like you or care about
your feelings. If I want to avoid communicating this, I have to supplement it with
other things like an apology (Im really sorry) and an excuse or account of why
I cannot come to your party (I have to do my discourse analysis homework).

You can divide almost any conversation into a series of adjacency pairs.
Sometimes, though, adjacency pairs can be quite complicated, with pairs of
utterances overlapping or being embedded in other pairs of utterances.
Nevertheless, for conversation analysts, it is this underlying pair wise
organization of utterances that helps us to make sense of our conversations and
use them to accomplish actions in an orderly way.

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There is, of course, a lot more to both pragmatics and conversation analysis than
has been covered in this brief summary. Pragmatics, for example, has much more
to say about the various cognitive models that people bring to interaction, and
conversation analysis has much to say about how people manage things like
turn-taking, topic negotiation, openings and closings, and repair in
conversations. What we have focused on here is primarily how each of these
approaches addresses the problem of ambiguity in spoken discourse the
problem that people do not always say what they mean or mean what they say.

TM

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 B6 NEGOTIATING RELATIONSHIPS AND ACTIVITIES

Power and politeness

Whenever we interact with someone we always communicate something about
our relationship with them. We do this by using various discursive strategies,
which we have divided into two categories: involvement strategies and
independence strategies. Involvement strategies are strategies people use to
communicate friendliness or solidarity, and independence strategies are
strategies people use to communicate respect or deference.

In many cases, both parties in an interaction share a fairly clear idea about how
close they are and whether one has more power than the other, but in other
cases, participants in interaction need to negotiate their relationship. Such
negotiations are common, for example, as people move from more distant to
closer relationships, or when one person wishes to challenge another persons
assertion of power or dominance.

Regardless of whether or not a relationship is seen as negotiable, we always
approach interactions with certain sets of expectations about how independence
and involvement strategies will be used to communicate information about
power and intimacy. We call these expectations face systems. Although
expectations about when independence and involvement strategies are
appropriate and what they mean vary across cultures and groups, most people
enter interaction with three basic ideas: 1) in interactions where the parties are
socially distant but relatively equal, both parties are likely to use independence
strategies (deference face system); 2) in interactions where people are close and
relatively equal, they are likely to use involvement strategies (solidarity face
system); and 3) in interactions in which one person has more power than the
other (regardless of their social distance) the more powerful one is more likely
to use involvement strategies and the less powerful one is more likely to use
independence strategies.

Like the conversational maxims we discussed in the last section, these systems
should not be treated as rules, but rather as broad sets of expectations people
draw on to decide how to act towards other people and how to interpret others
behavior towards them. Since power and distance are relative rather than
absolute, and because interaction often involves the negotiation of power and
distance, people usually employ both independence and involvement strategies,
mixing them tactically depending on the situation and what they are trying TM to
accomplish in the interaction.

An example of the way participants often strategically mix independence and

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involvement strategies can be seen in the following conversation between a
senior engineer (Martin) and his subordinate (Ollie) reported in Ladegaard
(2011):

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Martin: Happy birthday or (0.2) whatever it is (laughing)
Ollie: thank you (0.2) its actually a while ago
Martin: okay eh: Ollie//
Ollie: //theres Danish pastry over there if youre interested (0.2)
Martin: thanks ah: (0.6) (talks about tape recorder)
Martin: okay well to cut a long story short Sam called (0.2) and Im not
sure how busy you are or what youre doing right now (0.4)
Ollie: ah: were just about to launch the [name] project and ah:
Martin: okay
Ollie: so this is where we are [xxx] quite busy (0.5) but Sam called you
said
Martin: yes (0.2)
Ollie: and he? (0.3)
Martin: he needs some help here and now (0.2) he needs someone to
calculate the price of rubber bands (0.3) for the [name] project in India
Ollie: okay
Martin: they expect the customer to sign today (1.3)
Ollie: okay
(Ladegaard 2011: 14-15)

In this example, Martin, the more powerful participant, begins using involvement
strategies, wishing Ollie happy birthday (although it is not his birthday) and
laughing. Ollie, on the other hand, though friendly, uses more independence
strategies, accepting the inappropriate, birthday wish and then using words like
actually and a while to soften his revelation that it is not his birthday, and then
offering Martin some pastry in a way which is designed not to impose on him
(if youre interested). Were Martin and Ollie equals and friends, the
inappropriate birthday wishes might have been answered in a more direct way
like, What are you talking about? My birthday was ages ago!, and the offer of
pastry might have been more insistent (Have some Danish!). In other words, the
mixture of involvement and independence strategies in the beginning of the
conversation are what one might expect within a hierarchical face system.

What happens next in the conversation, however, is rather interesting. Martin,
the more powerful person, changes to independence strategies, asking Ollie how
busy he is and making it clear that he does not wish to impose on him. In fact, he
acts so reluctant to make the request that Ollie practically has to drag it out of
him (but Sam called you said and he?). This, in fact, is the opposite of what one
might expect in a hierarchical relationship. Of course, this shift in politeness
strategies, with the more powerful participant using independence strategies
and the less powerful one showing more involvement does not really reflect TMa
shift in power. Rather, it is a clever strategy Martin has used to make it more
difficult for Ollie to refuse the request by putting him in the position of soliciting

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it.

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 The point of this analysis is that, even though our expectations about face
systems form the background to how we communicate about relationships,
people often strategically confound these expectations to their own advantage.

One further factor, that determines which strategy a person will use to
communicate his or her relationship with another person is the topic of the
conversation he or she is engaged in. In cases in which the topic of the
conversation is serious or potentially embarrassing for either party, or in which
the weight of imposition is seen to be great, independence strategies will be
more common, whereas in situations where the topic is less serious, the outcome
more predictable and the weight of imposition seen to be relatively small,
involvement strategies are more common.

As can be seen in the example above, rather than as simple reflections of a priori
relationships of power and distance or the weightiness of a particular topic, face
strategies can be regarded as resources that people use to negotiate social
distance, enact power relationships, and sometimes manipulate others into
doing things which they may not normally be inclined to do. A person might use
involvement strategies with another not because they are close, but because he
or she wants to create or strengthen the impression that there is a power
difference. Similarly, a person might use independence strategies not to create a
sense of distance from the person they are interacting with, but rather to endow
the topic under discussion with a certain weightiness. In other words, face
strategies are not just reflections of the expectations about relationships that
people bring to interactions but resources they make use of to manage and
sometimes change those relationships on a moment-by-moment basis.

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Framing and contextualization cues

As we have seen above, conversational strategies like involvement and
independence are not just ways that we communicate and manage our
relationships with other people, but also ways that we communicate something
about what we are doing (the degree, for example, to which we think we are
imposing on other people). We also have other ways of signaling to people what
we think we are doing in an interaction, whether we, for example, are arguing,
joking, commiserating or making small talk. Whenever we speak, in fact, we
communicate not just the message contained in (or implied by) our words, but
also information about what we think we are doing and, therefore, how our
TM
words should be interpreted. We call the signals we use to communicate this
information contextualization cues.

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In Section A6 we said that there are basically two kinds of frames: broader
primary frameworks which consist of the relatively stable sets of expectations we
bring to particular situations (like lectures or medical consultations), and
smaller, more dynamic interactive frames, which consist of our negotiated ideas

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 about what we are doing moment by moment in a conversation, ideas which
often change rapidly in the course of an interaction. Although contextualization
cues are often important in signaling primary frameworks, they are particularly
important in the role they play in helping us to manage and negotiate interactive
frames.

Sometimes contextualization cues are verbal, that is, we signal what we are
doing through our choice of topic, vocabulary, grammar, or even the language
that we use. For example, in her analysis of the talk of teachers in bilingual
classrooms, Angel Lin (1996), has pointed out that when English teachers in
Hong Kong are focusing on teaching, they tend to use English, but when they are
engaged in reprimanding their students, they tend to switch to Cantonese.
Sometimes these verbal cues involve adopting a particular social language (see
Sections A4, B4) or certain genres (see Sections A3, B3) associated with
particular kinds of activities. A doctor, for example, might begin a consultation
with a period of small talk in which the language might be extremely informal
and the topic might range from the weather to a local sports team before he or
she shifts gears and starts talking like a doctor.

One of the most obvious ways we signal shifts in frames verbally is through what
are known as discourse markers. These are words or phrases that often rather
explicitly mark the end of one activity and the beginning of another. A lecturer,
for example, might move from the pre-lecture chatting and milling around frame
to the formal lecture frame with words like Okay, lets get started Similarly,
the doctor might move from small talk to the more formal medical examination
by saying something like So, how are you feeling? Discourse markers typically
consist of words like okay, so, well, and anyway, as well as more formal
connectors like first, next, and however. It is important to remember that
discourse markers do not always signal a shift in frame sometimes they signal
other things like the relationship between one idea and another (see Section B2).

These verbal strategies are not the only ways, or even the most common ways,
people signal what they are doing when they talk. Contextualization cues also
include non-verbal signals delivered through things like gestures, facial
expressions, gaze, our use of space, and paralinguistic signals delivered through
alterations in the pitch, speed, rhythm or intonation of our voices. For this
reason, people who study frames and contextualization cues often pay a lot of
attention to marking things like stress, intonation and pausing and even facial
expressions, gestures and other movements when they produce transcripts of
the conversations they are studying.

These non-verbal and paralinguistic contextualization cues are sometimes much
more subtle than verbal strategies and so more easily misunderstood. The TM way
they are used and interpreted might also vary considerably from group to group
or even person to person. In one of his most famous studies, Gumperz (1982a:

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173-174) found a mismatch between the ways South Asian servers in a staff
canteen in a British airport used intonation as a contextualization cue and the
ways their British customers interpreted them. The South Asian servers, for
example, used falling intonation when asking customers if they wanted gravy on

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 their meat (consistent with the conventions of their variety of English), but the
British customers, expecting the rising intonation they associated with a polite
offer, interpreted the servers behavior as rude. What this example tells us is that
contextualization cues do not in themselves contain information about what we
think we are doing rather, they activate culturally conditioned assumptions
about context, interactional goals and interpersonal relationships that might be
different for different people.

As we said above, interactive frames are not static, but can change rapidly in the
course of an interaction. They are also, as their name implies, interactive that is,
they are always a matter of negotiation between participants in the conversation,
and the way they are used and interpreted often has a great deal to do with
things that happened previously in the conversation and with the history of the
relationship between those involved. In other words, just as face strategies of
involvement and independence, while primarily providing information about
relationships, also give clues as to what we think we are doing and our attitude
towards it, framing strategies, while primarily signaling what we think we are
doing, also play an important role in managing relationships.

In an article called Talking the Dog, in which she examines how people use pets
to frame and reframe their utterances in interaction, Deborah Tannen (2004)
gives the following example of a conversation between a woman, Clara, and her
husband, Neil, in the presence of their dog, Rickie.

Clara: You leave the door open for any reason?
((short pause, sound of door shutting))
> <babytalk> Rickie,
> hes helpin burglars come in,
> and you have to defend us Rick.>
Tannen 2004:413)

In this example, Clara shifts frames from talking to her husband to talking to the
dog by altering her voice quality (adopting the high pitched and playful tone of
baby talk). In a sense, though, she is still talking to her husband, communicating
to him through the dog the potential seriousness of leaving the door open. By
addressing her remarks to the dog, however, and by adopting a different tone of
voice, she shifts the frame from scolding to playing, allowing her to get the
message across without threatening her husbands face.

Sometimes participants in an interaction will experience disagreement regarding
whats going on. The way one person frames the conversation, for example, may
be at odds with the other persons wishes, expectations or interpretation of the
situation. In some cases, they may simply accept the framing that has been TM
imposed by the other person, or they may contest or resist it by either
attempting to reframe the conversation using their own contextualization cues

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or by breaking the frame altogether and engaging in a meta-conversation about
whats going on.

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 The film When Harry Met Sally (1988 Castle Rock Pictures) contains a number of
good examples of characters competitively negotiating frames in interaction. In
the following example, Harry, who is going out with Sallys best friend, tells Sally
that he thinks she is attractive, and what ensures is a negotiation about what
such a statement means based on what he was doing when he said it.

HARRY: Youre a very attractive person.
SALLY: Oh, thank you.
HARRY: Amanda never said you were so attractive.
SALLY: Maybe she doesnt think Im attractive.
HARRY: Its not a matter of opinion. Empirically you are attractive.
SALLY: Harry, Amanda is my friend.
HARRY: So?
SALLY: So youre going with her.
HARRY: So?
SALLY: So youre coming on to me.
HARRY: No I wasnt.
HARRY (continuing): What? Cant a man say a woman is attractive
without it being a come-on?
HARRY (continuing): All right. Lets just say for the sake of argument it
was a come-on. Okay. What do you want me to do? I take it back. All right,
I take it back.
SALLY: You cant take it back.
HARRY: Why not?
SALLY: Its already out there.
An awkward pause
HARRY: Ohm jeez. What are we supposed to do now? Call the cops? Its
already out there.
SALLY: Just let it lie, okay?
HARRY: Right, right. Let it lie. Thats my policy. Let it lie So, you want to
spend the night in the motel?
HARRY (continuing): See what I did? I didnt let it lie.
SALLY: Harry --
HARRY: I said I would and then I didnt -- --
SALLY: Harry ----
HARRY: I went the other way ----
SALLY: Harry ----
HARRY: Yes?
SALLY: We are just going to be friends, okay?
HARRY: Yeah. Great. Friends. Best thing.

In this example, Harry tries to frame his initial compliment as an objective
observation using formal language like empirically. Sally, however, labels TM what
he is doing as a come on, a label which he first resists with the question, Cant a
man say a woman is attractive without it being a come-on?, framing the

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accusation as unreasonable and possibly sexist. He then half accepts her framing
and offers to take it back. This acceptance is only partial because he frames it as
hypothetical (Lets just say for the sake of argument it was a come-on). Sally,
however, does not accept his retraction, framing a come on as an irreparable

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 breech in decorum, which Harry responds to by again shifting frames from
conciliation to mocking (What are we supposed to do now? Call the cops?).
What happens after this, however, is particularity interesting. After agreeing to
let it lie, that is, abandon this particular negotiation about framing, Harry then
issues what is unambiguously a come-on, and then deflects her objections by
again engaging in meta-conversation about his own framing (See what I did? I
didnt let it lie I said I would and then I didnt I went the other way).

Part of the humor in this scene lies in the fact that it foregrounds the process of
framing itself, a process which is usually left tacit in conversations. It also shows
how complex and contentious negotiations of framing can be, with parties not
only shifting frames, breaking frames, and attempting to reframe the utterances
of themselves and others, but also superimposing frames on top of other frames
in order to create strategic ambiguity (as when Harry imposes a hypotheictal
frame onto his admission of guilt).

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 B7 THE SPEAKING MODEL

Speech acts, speech events and speech situations

The main unit of analysis for the ethnography of speaking is the speech event,
which can be defined as a communicative activity that has a clear beginning and
a clear ending and in which peoples shared understandings of the relevance of
various contextual features remain fairly constant throughout the event.
Examples of speech events are such things as religious ceremonies, lessons,
debates, and conversations. Speech events occur within broader speech
situations, and are made up of smaller speech acts of the type we have already
discussed (including such things as greeting, questioning, promising and
insulting, see Section B5). For example, a university lecture can be considered a
speech event which occurs within the speech situation of a school day and is made
up of smaller speech acts like asking and answering questions, giving
explanations and illustrations of certain concepts, and even joking or
threatening. Similarly, the speech event of a conversation may occur within the
larger speech situation of a party and may include smaller speech acts like joking.
Notice that the same speech act, joking for example, can take place in many
different kinds of speech events, and that different speech events, conversations
for example, can occur in many different kinds of speech situations.

What distinguishes a speech event from a speech situation is not just its size and
the fact that speech events tend to have clearer boundaries. The main distinction
is coherence (see Section B2): participants tend to approach speech events with
consistent sets of expectations that remain the same throughout the speech
event, whereas participants expectations about the relevant features of context
may undergo dramatic changes throughout a speech situation: students eating
lunch at the university canteen during a school day, for example, are likely to pay
attention to different sorts of things than they do in a lecture during the same
day. The way to distinguish between a speech situation and a speech event, then,
is to ask if the same rules of SPEAKING apply throughout the phenomenon. If so
it can be regarded as a speech event.

SPEAKING

One potentially confusing aspect of the ethnography of speaking is that it does
not, as its name implies, focus so much on rules and expectations about speaking
so much as rules and expectations about the circumstances in which certain TM
kinds of speaking takes place (or, does not take place). In fact, one of the most
famous studies using this approach, Keith Bassos examination of silence among
the Western Apache in the United States, explored the conditions under which,

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for members of this speech community, not speaking is considered the most
appropriate behavior.

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 Ron and Suzanne Scollon have used the term the Grammar of Context to refer to
a model very much like Hymess speaking model (Scollon, Scollon and Jones
2011). Their reasons for comparing the rules and expectations associated with
context to the kinds of rules and expectations associated with the grammar of a
language are twofold: first, to highlight that the same difference between
competence and performance which we see in grammar also occurs in rules and
expectations associated with context: not everyone performs in particular
speech events exactly in accordance with how people in their speech community
(including themselves) think they should; and second, to introduce the notion of
markedness into the analysis of context.

The idea of 'unmarked (the usual or normal way of saying or doing something)
vs. 'marked' (an unusual or deviant way of saying or doing something) was
introduced into structural linguistics by the Prague School of linguists, which
included such figures as Roman Jakobson (see Jakobson 1990: 134-40). Although
the concept is quite complex, the general idea is that when people deviate from
the default or expected way of using language, the result is often the expression
of some special, more precise or additional meaning. This is an idea we have
already encountered in our discussion of pragmatics and the cooperative
principle. When it is applied to context, it reminds us that communicative
competence does not refer to a set of rules that must be followed, but rather to a
set of expectations that experienced speakers can sometimes manipulate in
order to strategically manage the meanings of speech acts, the relationships
among participants, or the outcomes of the speech event.

The components of the SPEAKING model devised by Hymes, therefore, are not
meant to provide an objective list of those elements of context which need to be
taken into account by the analyst, but rather a set of guidelines an analyst can
use in attempting to find out what aspects of context are important and relevant
from the point of view of participants. In other words, in any given speech event,
different elements will be afforded different weight by participants, and some
might be regarded as totally unimportant.

The first component in the model is setting, which refers to the time and place of
the speech event as well as any other physical circumstances. Along with the
physical aspects of setting, Hymes included what he called the psychological
setting or the cultural definition of a scene. The unmarked setting for a
particular speech event, for example, might be in a church. A church has
particular physical characteristics, but it is also likely to have certain associations
for people in a particular culture so that when they enter a church they are
predisposed to speak or behave in certain ways. Thus, the component of setting
can have an effect on other components like key and instrumentalities (see
below). TM

The second component in the SPEAKING model is participants. Most of the

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approaches to spoken discourse we have looked at so far, including conversation
analysis and pragmatics, begin with the assumption of an essentially didactic
model of communication in which the participants are the speaker and the
hearer. Ethnographic work, however, indicates that many if not most speech

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 events involve many kinds of participants, not just speakers and hearers, but also
participants like audiences and bystanders. Furthermore, groups differ in their
ideas of which participants in speech events are considered legitimate or
relevant (for example, maids, pets, supernatural beings). Besides identifying the
relevant participants, the different kinds of identities, roles and rights different
participants have are also important. These aspects, of course, will depend on
things like the genre of the speech event, and may change over the course of the
speech event in accordance with a particular act sequence (see below).

The third component of the model is ends, which refers to the purpose, goals and
outcomes of the event, which, of course, may be different for different
participants (the goals of a teacher, for example, are not always the same as the
goals of his or her students), and the fourth component is act sequence, the form
the event takes as it unfolds, including the order of different speech acts and
other behaviors. Both of these components are intimately connected not just
with expectations about participant roles, but also with the genre of the speech
event.

The fifth component in the model is key, by which is meant the overall tone or
mood of the speech event. Key is important because it provides an attitudinal
context for speech acts, sometimes dramatically altering their meaning (as with
sarcasm). At the same time, key is often signaled in very subtle ways that are
sometimes outside the purview of most linguistic analysis. We have already
explored some of these signals in our discussion of contextualization cues in
Section B6.

The sixth component is instrumentalities, meaning the message form the
means or media through which meaning is made. Speech, for example, might be
spoken, sung, chanted or shouted, and it may be amplified through microphones,
broadcast through electronic media, or written down and somehow passed back
and forth between participants. Typically, speech events include complex
combinations of instrumentalities that interact with one another and with the
other components in the model. In the next strand on mediated discourse
analysis we will explore in more detail the effect different instrumentalities can
have on speech acts and speech events.

The seventh component is norms, which can be divided into norms of interaction
and norms of interpretation. These are the common sets of understandings that
participants bring to events about what is appropriate behavior and how
different actions and utterances ought to be understood. The important thing
about norms is that they may be different for different participants (a waiter vs.
a customer, for example) and that the setting of norms is often a matter of
power and ideology (see Section A4). TM

Finally, the eighth component is genre, or the type of speech event. We have

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already dealt at length with the concept of genre (see Section B3), and, although
Hymess understanding of genre is slightly different from that of genre analysts
like Swales and Bhatia, much of what was said before about community
expectations, form, and communicative purpose applies here. The most

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 important aspect of this component is the notion that certain speech events are
recognizable by members of a speech community as being of a certain type, and
as soon as they are labeled as such, many of the other components of the model
like ends, act sequence, participant roles and key are taken as givens.

It should be clear from this brief rundown of the components of the SPEAKING
model that none of them can really be considered alone: each component
interacts with other components in multiple ways. The most important job of an
analyst using this model, then, is not just to determine the kinds of knowledge
about the different components members of speech communities need to
successfully participate in a given speech event, but also to determine how the
different components are linked together in particular ways for different speech
events. For it is in these linkages, the ways, for example, different kinds of
participants are associated with different genres, or different settings are seen as
suitable for different purposes, or different forms of discourse or media are
associated with different keys, that the analyst can begin to get an understanding
of deeper cultural assumptions about people, places, values, power and
communication itself that exist in a particular speech community.

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 B8 MEDIATION

Cultural tools

The starting point for mediated discourse analysis is the concept of mediation.
The traditional definition of mediation is the passing of a message through some
medium, which is placed, between two or more people who are communicating.
When we think of media, we usually think of things like newspapers, television
and computers. Lots of people have pointed out that when messages pass
through media, they change fundamentally. Different kinds of media favor
different kinds of meanings. The kinds of meaning people can make in a
newspaper article, for example, are different from those they can make in a
television broadcast. This fact led the media scholar Marshall McLuhan
(1964/2001) to make the famous pronouncement: the medium is the message.

Mediated discourse analysis is also interested in how different media like
televisions and computers affect the way people use discourse, but it takes a
rather broader view of media and mediation. This view comes from the work of
the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky (1981) had the idea that all
actions that people take in the world are somehow mediated through what he
called cultural tools. Cultural tools can include technological tools like televisions,
computers, and megaphones, but also include more abstract tools like languages,
counting systems, diagrams and mental schema. Anything an individual uses to
take action in the world can be considered a cultural tool.

The important thing about cultural tools is that they make it easier to perform
some kinds of actions and communicate some kinds of meanings, and more
difficult to take other kinds of actions and communicate others kinds of
meanings. In other words, all tools come with certain affordances and constraints.
Writing a letter or an email, for example, allows us to do things that we cannot do
when we are producing spoken discourse in the context of a conversation, things
such as going back and deleting or revising things we have written before. But it
is more difficult to do other things like gauge the reaction of other people to what
we are writing as we are writing it (as we can do with spoken language in face-
to-face conversations). A microphone makes it easier to talk to a large group of
people, but more difficult to say something private to a person standing next to
you (as some politicians have rather painfully learned). Most instant messaging
programs make it easy to have a real time conversation, but more difficult to
interrupt ones conversational partner in the middle of an utterance the way we
can do in face-to-face conversations. TM

What this idea of affordances and constraints means for discourse analysis is that

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the kinds of discourse and other tools we have available to us affect the kinds of
actions that we can take. In many situations, for example, such as ordering lunch
in a restaurant in a remote area of China, access to the tool of the Chinese
language will allow us to do different things than we could do with the tool of

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 English. Different modes and media also allow us to do different things: we can
perform different actions with pictures and gestures than we can with words
(see Section A9), and we can do different things with mobile telephones than we
can with landlines. Even genres and social languages have affordances and
constraints. A rsum, for example, might be effective for getting a job, but less
effective for getting a date with a man or a woman whom we fancy. Even in the
context of getting a job, the genre may make it easy to communicate things about
formal education, credentials and work experience, but more difficult to
communicate things about more informal learning and non-work experience.

And so, when we perform mediated discourse analysis, we first identify the
actions that are important to a particular social actor in a particular situation and
then attempt to determine how the cultural tools (such as languages and other
modes, media, genres and social languages) contribute to making these actions
possible and making other kinds of actions impossible or more difficult. Of
course, we also have to recognize that many of the cultural tools we use to
perform actions are not discursive. If you want to put together a piece of
furniture you have bought at IKEA, while some discourse such as the instructions
for assembly might be very important, if you lack access to technological tools
like a hammer and a screwdriver, no amount of discourse can make it possible
for you to perform the actions you need to perform.

This simple idea that having access to different kinds of tools makes it easier or
more difficult to perform social actions has important implications. Earlier, for
example, we discussed how people sometimes try to use discourse to advance
certain ideologies or versions of reality in order to try to affect what people
think. Mediated discourse analysis highlights the fact that discourse does not just
have a role in affecting what we think, but also, in a very practical way, in
affecting what we can do. If we do not have the proper tools available to us, there
are certain things that we simply cannot do. And so people who have access to
particular tools (such as languages, genres, electronic media) can often exert
certain power over people who do not in very concrete ways. If we also consider
that our social identities are created through the actions that we can take, we
come to the conclusion that the tools we have available to us and how we use
them help to determine not just what we can do, but who we can be.

At the same time, human beings are extremely creative in their use of tools. If I
do not have a screwdriver to put together my IKEA table, I might try using a
butter knife. If the genre of the rsum does not allow me to showcase my
talents, I might try to bend that genre or blend it with another genre. In fact, one
important focus of mediated discourse analysis is in exploring the tension that
exists between the affordances and constraints built in to different cultural tools
and the ways people creatively appropriate and adapt those tools into different TM
situations to achieve different goals.

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One example of the way technological tools can affect the kinds of things we can
do when we communicate, and the creative ways people adapt to these
affordances and constraints, can be seen in the way people use online personal
ads and dating sites. In Section B3 we considered print based personal ads as a

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 kind of genre and discussed how, by mastering the structure of the genre, people
claim membership in different discourse communities. Nowadays, however,
most people rely on electronic personal ads (or profiles) rather than print based
ones. These new online profiles introduce a new set of affordances and
constraints for users. In older, print-based ads, for example, users had much
more control over self-presentation, which was performed entirely through text.
While such ads often invited the later exchange of pictures, users had a way of
vetting potential prospects before sending a picture, thereby maintaining some
degree of privacy. On online dating sites, where the inclusion of a picture is
expected up front, users relinquish their control over physical self-description
and risk disclosing their identities to unintended parties (such as employers, co-
workers, or family members). In other words, the inclusion of pictures in profiles
introduces both affordances (it allows for a fuller an more accurate presentation
of self) and constraints (it makes it more difficult for the owners of profiles to
control information about themselves). In my own study of online gay dating
sites (Jones 2009), I discovered how users creatively deal with this challenge by
posting pictures designed to strategically obscure their identities or by posting
pictures of celebrities, cartoon characters or even inanimate objects which reveal
something about their personalities or interests without giving away their
identities. There are two important points to take from this example. The first is
that every new affordance in a cultural tool also brings along with it some new
constraint, and second, experienced users of tools, like experienced users of
genres (see Section B3), often find ways to creatively adapt to the affordances
and constraints of the tools they are using.

Context revisited: Sites of engagement

Mediated discourse analysts call the situations into which tools are appropriated
sites of engagement. Sites of engagement are moments when different kinds of
social actors, different kinds of cultural tools and different kinds of social
relationships come together to make certain actions possible.

In the previous section we explored the importance of context in the production
of meaning. The problem with the idea of context from the point of view of
mediated discourse analysis is that it takes texts as its reference point. The idea
of sites of engagement takes social actions as its reference point. Instead of
making an artificial distinction between discourse and everything else, it
considers all cultural tools (texts, furniture, objects, machines) that are available
to social actors at a particular time in a particular place and explores how they
contribute to making possible certain kinds of actions.

Ron and Suzanne Wong Scollon (2004) say that all social actions occur at tTM he
nexus or coming together of three crucial elements: 1) the discursive resources
and other cultural tools that people have available for action (which they call
discourses in place), 2) the social relationships among the people involved

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(which they call the interaction order), and the knowledge, abilities and
experiences of the individual social actor (which they call the historical body).

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 To illustrate how these three elements come together to form the site of
engagement of a social action we can take the example of crossing a busy city
street (see figure B8.1). There is normally a lot of discourse available to people in
this situation. There are things like street signs, traffic signals and zebra stripes
painted on the pavement to assist pedestrians in crossing the street; there is also
a lot of discourse such as shop signs and advertisements that might actually
interfere with the action of successfully crossing the street. And so one of the
most important things for people engaged in performing this action is
determining which discourse to attend to and which discourse to ignore.

The second element is the interaction order, the relationships people have with
the people with whom they are crossing the street. If we are crossing the street
alone, for example, we might take extra care in checking for on-coming traffic,
whereas if we are part of a large crowd of people, we might pay more attention
to the actions of other pedestrians to decide when to cross simply by following
them. If we are with someone else, we might find we need to distribute our
attention between the action of crossing the street and some other action such as
carrying on a conversation or making sure our companion (if they are, for
instance, a small child) gets across the street safely.

Finally, the action of crossing the street depends on peoples knowledge and
experience of crossing city streets, the habits and mental models they have built
up around this social practice, which the Scollons refer to as the historical body.
Most of the time we do things like crossing the street in a rather automatic way.
When we find ourselves in unfamiliar situations, however, our habitual ways of
doing things sometimes do not work so well. Most of us have found ourselves
having some difficulty crossing streets in cities where conventions about which
discourses in place pedestrians ought to attend to or what kind of behavior is
expected from drivers are different from those in the city in which we live.

TM

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Figure B8.1 Crossing the street

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 And so the main differences between the ideas of site of engagement and
context are, first, that while contexts take texts as their points of reference,
sites of engagement take actions as their points of reference, and second, that
while contexts are usually considered to be external to the social actor, sites of
engagement are a matter of the interaction among the texts and other cultural
tools available in a social situation, the people that are present, and the habits,
expectations and goals of individuals.


Find additional examples online

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B9 MODES, MEANING AND ACTION

Multimodal discourse analysis, the analysis of how multiple modes of
communication interact when we communicate, tends to be divided into two
broad approaches, one which focuses on texts (like magazines and web pages)
and the other which focuses on real time interactions. One important concept
that is common to both of these approaches is the idea that different modes have
different affordances and constraints. We introduced the idea of affordances and
constraints in the last section when we said that different cultural tools make
some actions easier and other actions more difficult.

When we say that different modes have different affordances and constraints, we
mean both that they have different sets of meaning potential and that they allow
us to take different kinds of actions. For example, in written text and spoken
language we must present information in a sequential way governed by the logic
of time. Thus, an author or speaker can manipulate the order and speed at which
information is given out, perhaps withholding certain facts until later in the text
or conversation for strategic purposes. Images, on the other hand, are governed
by the logic of space. The producer of the image presents all of the elements in
the image all at once and has limited control over the order in which viewers
look at those elements. Similarly, images allow for the communication of very
fine gradations of meaning when it comes to things like shape and color the
exact shade of pink in someones cheeks, for example whereas language forces
us to represent things in terms of types the word pink for example, cannot
represent an exact color, but only a range of colors within a particular class.
The fact that different modes make different kinds of meanings more possible
and others less possible is one of the reasons why people strategically mix
different modes when they are communicating, so that the constraints of one
mode are balanced out by the affordances of others. While there are some things
that just cannot be expressed in words, it might be possible to express them
with a carefully timed facial expression or a carefully placed image.

Communicative functions of modes

In Section A4 we introduced Hallidays idea that language has three basic
functions: it is used to represent our experience of the world; it is used to
communicate something about the relationship between us and the people with
whom we are communicating; and it is used to organize ideas, representations
and other kinds of information in ways that people can make sense of. We TM called
these three functions the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the
textual function. Although these three functions were originally conceived of as a
model for understanding language, Kress and van Leeuwen insist that they

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provide a useful starting point for studying all modes. In their book Reading
images: The grammar of visual design, for example, they explore how images also

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 fulfill these three functions, but do so in a rather different way than language
(see Section D9).

Ideational function

As noted in Section A4, the ideational function of language is accomplished
through the linking together of participants (typically nouns) with processes
(typically verbs), creating what Gee (2011) calls whos doing whats. In images,
on the other hand, participants are generally portrayed as figures, and the
processes that join them together are portrayed visually.

Images can be narrative, representing figures engaged in actions or events,
classificatory, representing figures in ways in which they are related to one
another in terms of similarities and differences or as representatives of types,
or analytical, representing figures in ways in which parts are related to wholes.

In narrative images, action processes are usually represented by what Kress and
van Leeuwen call vectors, compositional elements that indicate the directionality
of an action. In figure B9.1, for example, the arm of the boxer on the left
extending rightward towards the head of the other boxer portrays the process of
hitting. There are also other processes portrayed. For example, the upward
gazes of the figures in the background create vectors connecting the spectators
with the fighters.

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Figure B9.1 Warriors (photo credit Claudio Gennari)

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 Like this image, many images actually represent multiple processes
simultaneously. Figure B9.2, for example, also involves action processes, the face
on the left (representing a library user) joined to the different kinds of resources
he or she consumes, uses, evaluates, creates, combines, and shares. This image,
however, is more abstract, and so the vectors are represented as labeled arrows
rather than visual representations of these actions. At the same time, the image
also contains classificatory relationships the objects portrayed under the
headings Information Literacy, Media Literacy and Digital Literacy
representing distinct classes of things -- and analytical relationships -- the
smaller faces in the lower right corner, for example, portrayed as parts of a
larger social network.

Figure B9.2 Using information, media and digital literacy (credit Karin Dalziel)

Interpersonal function

Another important function of any mode is to create and maintain some kind
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relationship between the producer of the message and its recipient. As we said in
Section A4, in language these relationships are usually created through the

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languages system of modality, as well as through the use of different social
languages or registers.

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 In images, viewers are placed into relationships with the figures in the image,
and, by extension, the producers of the image, through devices like perspective
and gaze. The image of the child in figure B9.3 illustrates both of these devices.
The camera angle positions the viewer above the child rather than on the same
level, creating the perspective of an adult, and the childs direct gaze into the
camera creates a sense of intimacy with the viewer, though the expression on the
childs face does denote some degree of uncertainty. Another important device
for expressing the relationship between the viewer and the figures in an image is
how close or far away they appear. Long shots tend to create a more impersonal
relationship, whereas close-ups tend to create a feeling of psychological
closeness along with physical closeness.

Figure B9.3 Child (photo credit Denis Mihailov)

Modality in images is partially realized by how realistic the image seems to the
viewer. Photographs, for example, generally attest more strongly to the truth of
a representation than drawings or paintings. However, this is not always the
case. Scientific diagrams and sketches, for example, are often regarded as having
even more authority than photographs, and black and white images like those
often found in newspapers are often regarded as more realistic than highly
saturated color images in magazine advertisements.
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Textual function

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As we said above, while texts are organized in a linear fashion based on
sequentiality, images are organized spatially. Figures in an image, for example,
can be placed in the center or periphery of the image, on the top or the bottom,
the left or the right, and in the foreground or in the background. Although

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 producers of images have much less control than producers of written texts over
how viewers read the image, they can create pathways for the viewers gaze by,
for example, placing different figures in different places within the frame and
making some more prominent and others less prominent.

One obvious way to do this is by creating a distinction between foreground and
background, the figures which seem closer to the viewer generally commanding
more prominence. Another way is to place one or more figures in the center of
the image and others on the margins. Many images make use of the
center/margin distinction to present one figure or piece of information as the
center or nucleus of the image and the marginal figures as somehow dependent
upon or subservient to the central figure (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006).

Two other important distinctions in the composition of images, according to
Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) are the distinction between the left side and the
right side of the image, and the distinction between the upper part and the lower
part. Taking as their starting point, Hallidays idea that in language, given
information (information that the reader or hearer is already familiar with)
tends to appear at the beginning of clauses, and new information tends to appear
closer to the end of clauses, they posit that, similarly, the left side of an image is
more likely to contain given information and the right side to contain new
information. This is based on the assumption that people tend to read images in
the same way they read texts, starting at the left and moving towards the right.
This, of course, may be different for people from speech communities that are
accustomed to reading text from right to left or from top to bottom.

The distinction between the upper part of an image and the lower part is related
to the strong metaphorical connotations of up and down in many cultures
(Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). According to Kress and van Leeuwen, the top part of
the image is often used for more ideal, generalized or abstract information, and
the bottom for real, specific and concrete information. They give as an example
advertisements in which the upper section usually shows the promise of the
product, the status of glamour it can bestow on its users and the lower section
tends to provide factual information such as where the product can be obtained
(2006: 186).

Both of these principles can be seen in figure B9.4. In order to make sense of the
narrative of HIV transmission that the text tells, one must begin at the far left of
the advertisement and move to the far right. The figures of the man and the
woman on the left of the image constitute given information, while the virus on
the right of the image constitutes the new information. There is also a clear
demarcation between the upper half of the text and the lower half. While the
upper half does not portray the positive promise of a particular product aTM s
many advertisements do, it does represent a kind of idealized hypothetical
situation which the viewer is invited to imagine. Rather than a promise,

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however, it is something more akin to a threat. And the lower half of the image,
rather than giving information about where the product portrayed in the upper
half can be obtained, it gives information on how this hypothetical situation can

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 be avoided, along with specific information about such things as the name of the
organization that produced the ad and the condom company that sponsored it.

Figure B9. 4 AIDS prevention advertisement (Abrasco, Brazil)

This text also illustrates how images and words often work together. The words
Joy Stick, Play Station and Game Over tell the viewer how the images are to be
interpreted, and the slogan in the lower half of the text (You only have one life:
use a condom), explains the image of the condom above it. Finally, this text
shows how multimodality can be effective in getting viewers to make
connections between different Discourses. While the images belong to the
Discourse of biomedicine, the words invite the viewer to interpret these images
within the framework of the Discourse of video games.

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Multimodality in Interaction

Modes in face-to-face interaction such as gaze and gesture also fulfill these three
functions. The mode of gaze, for example, has an obvious interpersonal function,
creating a relationship between the gazer and whomever or whatever is the
object of the gaze. It also carries ideational meaning, conveying that the gazer is
looking at, watching or paying attention to something. Finally, gaze is often TM an
important textual resource, helping people to manage things like turn-taking in
conversations.

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While the inter-modal relationships (the ways multiple modes work together)
in static texts like the advertisement analyzed above can be complicated, they
can be even more complicated in dynamic interactions. One of the problems with

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 analyzing real time, face-to-face interactions is that participants have so many
modes available to them to make meaning. There are what Norris (2005) calls
embodied modes such as gaze, gesture, posture, head movement, proxemics
(the distance one maintains from his or her interlocutor), spoken language, and
prosody (features of stress and intonation in a persons voice). And there are also
disembodied modes like written texts, images, signs, clothing, the layout of
furniture and the architectural arrangement of rooms and other spaces in which
the interaction takes place. All of these different modes organize meaning
differently. Some, like spoken language and gaze tend to operate sequentially,
while others like gesture and prosody tend to operate globally, often helping to
create the context in which other modes like spoken language are to be
interpreted (see Section B6). Not all of these modes are of equal importance to
participants at any given moment in the interaction. In fact, different modes are
likely to take on different degrees of importance at different times. How then is
the analyst to determine which modes to focus on in a multimodal analysis?

Another problem with analyzing multimodality in face-to-face interactions is
that the spatial boundaries of interactions are not always as clear as the spatial
boundaries of texts. While the frame of an image clearly marks what should be
considered as belonging to the image and what should be considered external to
it, a conversation in a coffee shop is not so clearly bounded. In analyzing such an
interaction, how much of the surrounding modes should be taken into account?
Should the analyst consider, for example, the signs and posters on the walls, the
conversations occurring at other tables, the ambient music playing over the p.a.
system and the sounds of milk being steamed? What about the smell and taste of
the coffee?

Norris (2005) solves these two problems by adopting the practice of mediated
discourse analysis (see Sections A8 and B8) and taking action as her unit of
analysis. Thus, in determining which modes to focus on, the analyst begins by
asking what actions participants are engaged in and then attempts to determine
which modes are being used to accomplish these actions.

As we said in Section A8, actions are always made up of smaller actions and
themselves contribute to making up larger actions. Norris divides actions into
three types: lower-level actions, the smallest pragmatic meaning units of
communicative modes (including things like gestures, postural shifts, gaze shifts,
and tone units), higher-level actions (such as having a cup of coffee), and frozen
actions (previously performed actions that are instantiated in material modesa
half eaten plate of food, for example, or an unmade bed).

One of the goals of multimodal interaction analysis, then, is to understand how
participants in interaction work cooperatively to weave together lower-level TM
actions like gestures, glances, and head and body movements into higher-level
actions, and, in doing, so help to create and reinforce social practices, social

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relationships and social identities (see Section C9).

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 B10 PROCEDURES FOR CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE
ANALYSIS

Conducting a corpus-assisted discourse analysis requires a number of steps,
which include building a corpus, cleaning and tagging the corpus, analyzing the
corpus with computer tools using a number of procedures, and, finally,
interpreting the data. These last two steps tend to be cyclical and recursive. That
is, usually the results of several procedures need to be combined when we are
interpreting the data, and often our interpretations lead us to re-performing
these procedures or performing other procedures.

The first step in building a corpus is deciding what kinds of texts you want to
include in it and making sure that you can include a representative sample of
those kinds of texts. For very specialized corpora, such as the works of a
particular author, this is easy since there are a limited number of texts and you
can simply include them all. This is more difficult the less specific the corpus is.
For example, if you want to build a corpus of business letters, you need to decide
what kind of letters (sales letters, complaint letters, etc.) you want to include,
what kinds of companies these letters will come from, and what countries
and/or cultures will be included. You might choose texts based on some
predetermined criteria like topic or the inclusion of some keyword. Baker and
McEnery, in their study reprinted in Section D10, for example, chose the texts for
their corpus on the basis of whether or not they contained the words refugee or
refugees or the phrases asylum seeker or asylum seekers.

Another important decision is how many texts you are going to include in your
corpus. Generally with corpus-assisted analysis, the bigger the corpus the easier
it will be for you to make generalizations from your results. However, it is also
possible to have very small corpora.

You will probably also need a reference corpus. A reference corpus is another
corpus that you will compare your primary corpus with. It is usually made up of
a broader spectrum of texts or conversations than the corpus you are analyzing.
You might, for example, use one of the large corpora like the British National
Corpus, or you might choose another specialized corpus with a broader sample
of texts.

Nowadays it is actually quite easy to build a corpus since so many texts are
already in electronic format on the Internet. But is it important that you go
though these texts carefully and take out any HTML code or formatting that TM
might have been attached to them, which might interfere with your analysis. You
also might want to attach new code to certain parts of the text or to certain
words to aid your analysis. This later process to called tagging. Analysts, for

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example, sometimes insert code to indicate different parts of a text (like
introduction, body and conclusion), and others tag individual words based on
their grammatical function so they can detect grammatical patterns in their

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 analysis along with lexical patterns. It is important that each text in your corpus
is saved in separate text file.

The analysis of the corpus is carried out with a computer program, and there are
a number of such programs available for free on the internet. The most widely
used commercial program is called WordSmith Tools (http://www.lexically.net/
wordsmith/index.html), but there is also a very good free program available
called AntConc, developed by Laurence Anthony, which works on both Windows
and Macintosh operating systems (http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/
antconc_index.html). In the explanations and examples below I will describe how
to perform the relevant procedures using AntConc.

After your corpus has been cleaned and tagged, you need to import it in the
form of text files into your analysis program. In AntConc this is done by using the
commands File > Open File(s) (or Cntrl F). You may choose as many files as you
wish. If you would like to open a directory of files, choose Open Dir (or Cntrl D).

While there are a whole host of different operations that can be performed on
corpora using this software, the six most basic procedures useful for the
discourse analyst are as follows:

1) Generating word frequency lists
2) Calculating type token ratio
3) Analyzing concordances
4) Analyzing collocation
5) Analyzing keywords
6) Creating dispersion plots

Most of these procedures can be performed on their own, but it is usually a good
idea to perform them together with the other procedures since the results from
one procedure can often inform your interpretation of the results from the
others.

Word frequency and type token ratio

One of the most basic pieces of information you can get about your corpus from a
computer aided analysis is information about the frequency with which different
words occur. In AntConc a word frequency list for a corpus can be generated by
clicking on the Word List tab and then clicking the Start button. Unless you have
a good reason to treat words in different cases (e.g. refugee vs. Refugee) as
separate words, it is a good idea to tick Treat all data as lower case in the
Display Options. Words in frequency lists can be sorted by rank, frequency or
word, so an analyst can easily determine not just the most or least frequently TM
occurring words, but also check the frequency of specific words.

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After a word list is generated, the information necessary to calculate type token
ratio appears at the top of the AntConc window. Type token ratio is basically a
measure of how many different kinds of words occur in the text in relation to the
total number of words, and so can give some indication of the lexical complexity

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 of texts in a corpus. It is calculated by dividing the number of types by the
number of tokens. A low type token ration generally indicates a relatively
narrow range of subjects, a lack of lexical variety or frequent repetition. A high
type token ratio indicates a wider range of subjects, greater lexical variation,
and/or less frequent repetition. In the British National Corpus, the type token
ratio for the corpus of written texts is 45.53, whereas the type token ratio for the
corpus of spoken texts is 32.96. This confirms a number of things we already
know about the differences between speech and writing, in particular, that
writing tends to involve a much more varied and complex vocabulary, and that
speech tends to involve frequent repetition.

Usually the most frequent words in any text are function words (articles,
prepositions, pronouns and other grammatical words) such as the and a. While
looking at function words can be useful in helping you to understand
grammatical patterns, style and register in the corpus, content words like nouns,
verbs and adjectives are usually more relevant to finding evidence of
Discourses.

Concordances

Concordances show words in the context of the sentences or utterances in which
they were used. Usually we use frequency lists to give us an idea of what some of
the important words in a corpus might be, and then we do a concordance of
those words in order to find out more information about them. Concordances
can be sorted alphabetically based on the words either to the right or left of the
word that you searched for, and playing around with this sorting system is often
a good way to spot patterns in word usage. For example, in Baker and McEnerys
study reprinted in Section D10, the alphabetical sorting of words directly to the
left and right of the target word (refugee) helped reveal that refugees were
commonly described in newspaper articles in terms of quantification (using
numerals or terms like tens of thousands, more and more).

In AntConc concordances are created by typing a word or phrase into the Search
Term box, generating a list of instances in which this word appears in the corpus
listed in their immediate contexts. The search word appears in the concordance
in the center of the page highlighted in blue, with what occurs before and after
appearing to the left and the right of the word. The Kwic Sort dialogue can be
used to sort the concordance alphabetically based on the word one, two, three,
etc. places to the left or the right of the search term.

Collocation analysis

Collocation has to do with the fact that certain words tend to appear together. TM
Often words take on a negative or positive meaning based on the kinds of words
they are often grouped with. As Firth (1957) put it, You shall know a lot about a

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word from the company it keeps. For example, the verb commit is nearly
always associated with negative words like crime. We dont commit good
deeds, we perform them. Thus we find phrases like commit random acts of
kindness humorous.

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Analyzing the kinds of words that appear together with other words is an
especially useful way to understand the Discourses that are expressed in a
corpus because they can reveal patterns of association between different kinds
of words or concepts. In their study of the portrayal of refugees in the British
press, for example, Baker and McEnery note not just that the word stream is used
frequently in their corpus to describe the movement of refugees, but that in the
British National Corpus this word frequently collocates with the words tears,
blood, sweat, water and rain, giving it a generally negative connotation. Baker
(2006) refers to the situation where patterns can be found between words and
various sets of related words in ways that suggest a Discourse as discourse
prosody. Others (see for example Sinclair 1991) refer to this as semantic prosody.

In order to perform a collocation analysis with AntConc, click the Collocate tab
and enter your chosen search term. You will also need to determine the span to
the left or right of the search term within which you want to check for collocates.
This can be set from any number of words to the left of the search term to any
number of words to the right of the search term using the Window Span
dialogue. The result will be a list of collocates, their rank, overall frequency, and
the frequency with which they occur to the left of the search term and to the
right of the search term.

Keyword analysis

Word frequency lists can only tell you how frequently certain words occur in the
corpus. Some words, however, like articles, occur frequently in nearly every text
or conversation. The frequency with which a word occurs in a corpus is not in
itself necessarily meaningful. What is more important is whether or not a word
occurs more or less frequently than normal. This is what keyword analysis is
designed to determine.

The difference between keywords and frequent words is that keywords are
words that appear with a greater frequency in the corpus that you are studying
than they do in a reference corpus. Reference corpora usually consist of a
broader sampling of texts or conversations. Many people, for example, use large
publically available corpora like the British National Corpus.

In order to generate a list of keywords for your corpus with AntConc, it is first
necessary to load your reference corpus. This is done using the Keyword List
preferences (Tool Preferences > Keyword List). The reference corpus can be
loaded either as a list of files or as a directory. Once it is loaded, the keyword list
is generated by choosing the Keyword List tab and clicking Start. The result will
be a list of keywords, their rank, frequency and a number measuring their TM
keyness. The keyness value indicates the degree to which the word occurs more
frequently than expected in your primary corpus (taking the reference corpus as

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representing a normal pattern of frequency). Some programs also allow you to
calculate negative keyness, that is, to determine which words occur less
frequently than expected.

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 Dispersion Plots

Dispersion plots, referred to in AntConc as concordance plots, can give you
information about where words occur in texts. This can be particularly useful if
an analyst is interested in the structure of texts or conversations. A genre
analyst, for example, might be interested in the kinds of words or phrases that
occur in a section of a text associated with a particular move, or a conversation
analyst might want to explore the kinds of words that occur in different parts of a
conversation such as the opening or the closing.

In AntConc, concordance plots are generated by clicking the Concordance Plot
tab, typing in a search term and clicking Start. The result is a series of bars, each
representing a text in the corpus with lines representing where the search term
has appeared. Figure B10.1 shows the dispersion plots generated by searching
for the word love in a corpus of Lady Gaga songs.

Fig. B10.1 Concordance plots for Lady Gaga songs


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TM

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SECTION C

EXPLORATION: ANALYZING
DISCOURSE

TM

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 C1 DOING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: FIRST STEPS

As we said in section B1, there are basically three different ways of looking at
discourse: discourse as language beyond the clause; discourse as language in
use; and discourse as social practice. Each of the three different ways of looking
at discourse can lead us to ask different kinds of questions about the texts and
interactions that we encounter in our social lives. A view that sees discourse as
language above the level of the clause or the sentences leads us to ask: What
makes this text or a conversation a text or conversation rather than just a random
collection of sentences or utterances? What holds it together so that people can
make sense of it? A view that sees discourse as language in use leads us to ask:
What are people trying to do with this text and how do we know? Finally, a view
that sees discourse as a matter of social practice and ideology leads us to ask:
What kinds of people are the authors of this text or the participants in this
conversation trying to show themselves to be, and what kinds of beliefs or values
are they promoting?

Consider, for example, the text that is printed on the cardboard sleeve that comes
wrapped around a cup of coffee that you buy at Starbucks.

Starbucks is committed to reducing our

Environmental impact through increased
use of post-consumer recycled materials.
Help us help the planet.
_____

First ever 10% post-consumer fiber cup

60% post-consumer fiber sleeve
_____

Intended for single use only.

2005 Starbucks Coffee Company All rights reserved
US Patent no 5.205.47S and no. 6.863.644 and related
foreign patents pending

www.starbucks.com/wayiseeit

Although this text seems to be rather straightforward and in some ways trivial, if
we apply the three perspectives on discourse that we discussed in Section TM B1, we
can start to see how complex it really is, and how it relates to all sorts of non-
trivial aspects of our daily lives.

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We might start by looking at how this text is put together in a formal way. First of
all, we would notice that there are three different sections, and so can ask
ourselves how we interpret these three sections as going together, and how we

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 interpret the separate sentences in each section as relating to one another.

One way we are able to make sense of this text is because of certain grammatical
features in it. For example, we know that the pronoun us in the second sentence
refers to the name Starbucks in the first sentence, and this helps us to link these
two sentences together. Also, the sentence in the second section (First-ever 10%
post-consumer fiber cup 60% post-consumer fiber sleeve and the first sentence
in the third section (Intended for single use only) are incomplete. What they
really mean is (This cup and sleeve are the first-ever 10% post-consumer fiber
cup and 60% post-consumer fiber sleeve and This cup and sleeve are intended
for single use only. Since the same bit is left out of both of these sentences, this
helps us to relate the two sentences together.

But another way we make sense of this text comes from our expectations about
how texts like this are put together. We have seen thousands of similar kinds of
texts (such as product labels) in our lives, and so we know that what the product
manufacturers are trying to emphasize is usually placed in a more prominent
position (like the top) and that legal or technical information (e.g. stuff about
patent, copyright, warnings, etc.) is usually put at the bottom in smaller lettering.
This makes us pay less attention to it, although sometimes this information is
really the most important information in the text.

After considering the formal features of the text, we might then go on to consider
what exactly the authors of this text are trying to do. We would see that they are
actually trying to do a number of things. For example, in the first section, there
are two kinds of things they are doing: one is informing us (Starbucks is
committed to reducing our environmental impact) and the second is telling us
to do something through an imperative sentence (Help us help the planet). Such
actions are sometimes not altogether straightforward. For example, when
Starbucks asks you to help them help the planet what they are also doing is
asking you to help them make more money by buying more coffee.

The third section of the text also contains some rather indirect actions. By
giving the patent number of the sleeve, for example, Starbucks is not just
informing us, but is also warning us that the design for this sleeve belongs to
them and we cannot use it. Finally, by giving as their website URL, they are not
just informing us, but also inviting us to visit this website.

All in all, what the company is doing with this text is rather complex and
sometimes indirect. They are not just trying to tell us about this sleeve or about
their company policies; they are also trying to portray themselves as a good
company in order to make us want to buy more coffee from them.
TM
If we then consider this text from the perspective of discourse as social practice,
we might notice that there are several different (capital D) Discourses mixed

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together. There is the Discourse of Environmentalism in the first section, the
Discourse of Science in the second section (signaled by numbers like 10% and
60% and technical terms like post-consumer fiber), and the Discourse of Law
in the last section (signaled by legal terms like All rights reserved). By using

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 these three Discourses, the company is trying to show you that they are a certain
kind of company with certain kinds of values and certain kinds of power: first,
that they are a green and socially responsible company; second, that they are a
modern and scientific company that is on the cutting edge of innovation; and
third, that they are a powerful company that is able to hire lawyers to sue you if
you infringe on their patent or copyright.

This way of looking at this text and texts like it can be useful because it not only
helps us to interpret the meanings the authors are trying to express and the
actions they are trying to perform with the text, but also how the authors are
trying to manipulate us into thinking or feeling certain things or feeling certain
emotions about Starbucks or performing certain actions ourselves like ordering
a second cappuccino.

And so one way in to discourse analysis is to consider a text or a conversation
from the three perspectives on discourse we described in Section B1. In the
following sections, you will practice applying analytical tools and methods that
grow out of these three perspectives on discourse.

Find additional examples online

Activity

Another way in to discourse analysis might be to apply the four principles of
discourse discussed in Section A1 to a particular text or interaction.

1) The ambiguity of language
2) Language in the world
3) Language and social identity
4) Language and other modes

These principles also lead us to ask specific kinds of questions about a text or
interaction.

Look, for example, at the interaction below taken from my Facebook News Feed
(figure C1.1). The first thing you need to know, if you do not know this already, is
that people who use Facebook often take various quizzes or surveys which
purport to tell them something about their personalities or their hidden desires.
Friends sometimes pass these surveys around among themselves as a way to
share things that are of interest to them and build a feeling of closeness.

The second thing you need to know is that Emily Jane Wheeler is my niece TM and
when she took this quiz she was 13 years old. Cheri Jones Wheeler is her mother
and my sister.

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Figure C1.1 My Facebook News Feed


In order to apply the principles we discussed in Section A1 to this text, we might
ask the following four sets of questions:

1. How is the language in this interaction ambiguous? What do the people need
to know in order to interpret one anothers utterances correctly? Are there any
hidden or veiled meanings expressed?

2. How is meaning situated? How much does the meaning of these utterances
depend on where they appear and who says them and what they are trying to do
with these utterances?

3. How do people use language to express something about who they are
(including the kinds of people they are and what kinds of relationships they
have with the other people in the interaction)?

4. How are other modes (pictures, layout, emoticons) combined with language to
express meaning?

Discuss how posing these kinds of questions can help you to better understand
this interaction and then use the two methods outlined in this section (applying
the three perspectives and the four principles) to perform a preliminary
analysis on a piece of discourse from your own life.
TM
Do more activities online

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 C2 ANALYZING TEXTURE

As we said in Section B2, not only is texture (cohesion and coherence) necessary
to turn a collection of words or sentences into a text, but different kinds of texts
like shopping lists, newspaper articles and before and after ads have specific
kinds of texture associated with them.

First, different kinds of texts tend to use different kinds of cohesive devices.
Descriptive texts which give information about people or things (scientific
descriptions, encyclopedia entries) often make heavy use of pronoun reference
since pronouns allow writers to refer to the person or thing being talked about
without repeating his, her or its name. Advertising texts, on the other hand,
which describe products, are more likely to use repetition, since there are
benefits to repeating the name of the product in this context. Legal texts also
prefer repetition to reference since repeating a word rather than referring to it
with a pronoun avoids ambiguity.

Analytical and argumentative texts often make heavy use of conjunction, since
making logical connections between ideas is usually central to the process of
making an argument. In some ways, however, such devices can be deceptive,
used to give a text the appearance of logic when the relationships between ideas
are not actually logical. In a speech given shortly after Hong Kongs return to
China in 1997, for example, a university president in the territory made the
following statement:

I see a stable society because the future prosperity of Hong Kong and of the
region demands it.

Although the use of the word because casts what follows it as a reason why Hong
Kong will remain stable, what is actually given is a consequence of stability
(prosperity) rather than a reason why it will occur. What results is a kind of
tautology or circular argument.

We also mentioned above that different kinds of texts are also based on different
kinds of generic frameworks they present information or actions in certain
predictable sequences and they trigger different kinds of word knowledge.
Consider the following newspaper article.

Lady Gaga's meat dress voted most iconic outfit

Pop diva Lady Gaga's meat dress which raised eyebrows at the recent TM
MTV Video Music Awards has topped the list of the most iconic outfits of
2010.

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The eccentric 'Poker Face' hitmaker, who is known for her outrageous
fashion sense created ripples with her meaty outfit which has sweeped a
poll by website MyCelebrityFashion.com.
"What's everyone's big problem with my meat dress? Haven't they seen

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 me wear leather? Next time, I'll wear a tofu dress and the soy milk police
will come after me," said the 24-year-old singer who lashed at her critics
for the controversy created by her meat ensemble.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/Lady-Gagas-meat-dress-
voted-most-iconic-outfit/articleshow/7127426.cms


Perhaps the most obvious thing that makes the above text a text is that we
immediately recognize it as a certain kind of text: a news article. This generic
framework is triggered by a number of things. First, and most obvious are the
circumstances in which we are likely to encounter the text, in this case on the
website of The Times of India. There are other features of the text as well that
mark it as a newspaper article so that, even when it is transplanted into a
different context (like this book), we still recognize it as a news article. One of the
most salient is the headline a kind of title which summarizes the main idea of
the text in a kind of telegraphic language in which non-essential words like
articles and auxiliary verbs are left out.

Once the generic framework of a newspaper article is triggered, we expect the
information in the text to be presented in a certain way. For example, we expect
the first paragraph of the article to sum up the main points in the article, the
second paragraph to give a more elaborated account of these main points, and
subsequent paragraphs to present further details or the reactions of various
people to the news. It is in part because newspaper articles are structured in this
way that we are able to read them so efficiently.

Apart from its overall structure, this text is also held together by a number of
cohesive devices that are also characteristic of news articles. It might be useful,
however, to first consider the kinds of devices which are not used. There are no
instances, for example, of conjunction. This is not unusual since news articles (as
opposed to editorials or opinion pieces) are meant to report what happened
rather than to offer analysis or opinions. When news articles do use logical
connectors, they are usually of the additive or sequential type.

There is also relatively little use of reference in the text. Although there are
instances in which relative pronouns point back to their antecedents (meat
dress which, hitmaker, who is known), and also places where possessive
pronouns are used (her outrageous fashion sense, her meaty outfit) and where
the definite pronoun is used to refer back to a specific thing (The eccentric poker
face hitmaker), there are no instances in which Lady Gaga is referred to as she
or the meat dress is referred to as it. The exception to this relative paucity of
pronouns is in a quote from Lady Gaga herself in the third paragraph in which
she refers to herself using the pronouns I and me and her critics using the
TM
pronoun they).

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Rather than using pronouns, the author of this article chooses to refer back to
previously mentioned people and objects by calling them different names. Lady
Gaga, for example, becomes The eccentric Poker Face hitmaker, and meat
dress becomes meaty outfit and meat ensemble. Such rephrasing is not limited

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 to people and objects, but is also used for actions, for example, raised eyebrows
becoming created ripples.

There are many possible reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that
phrases like eccentric Poker Face hitmaker are much more interesting than
mere pronouns and so increase the entertainment value of the piece. A more
important reason, however, given the purpose of a news article to convey
information, is that such rephrasing allows the author not just to achieve
cohesion but also to efficiently deliver to the reader additional information about
the people and things under discussion. By calling Lady Gaga The eccentric
Poker Face hitmaker, the author is able not just to refer back to Lady Gaga, but
also to deliver additional information about her: that she is eccentric, that she
has a number of hit songs, and that the title of one of those songs is Poker Face.

The reiteration of key people, objects and concepts in articles like this using
alternate words and phrases creates lexical chains, which not only serve to bind
the sentences and paragraphs together but also reinforce the main messages of
such articles. In the article above, there are four such chains: First is the one
formed by words related to Lady Gaga (Pop diva, hitmaker, singer), second,
the one formed by words related to the meat dress (outfit, fashion, wear,
dress, ensemble), third, the one formed by words related to the winning of
awards or elections (voted, iconic, Awards, sweeped (sic), poll), and,
finally, the one formed by words having to do with shock or controversy (raised
eyebrows, eccentric, outrageous, created ripples, problem, come after,
lashed, critics, and controversy). These four lexical chains taken together
serve to highlight the four main elements of the story: Lady Gagas meat dress,
which caused a controversy when she wore it, has been voted as most iconic
fashion item by fans.


Find additional examples online

Activity

Now have a look at a text about the same topic which has a rather different
purpose and, consequently, a rather different texture. The text below is from a
blog by the animal rights group PETA. Its purpose is not so much to give
information about what Lady Gaga wore as it is to make an argument that her
choice of dress was unethical.


Last night, Lady Gaga tried once again to shock the world, this time TMby
wearing a "meat dress" during her acceptance of the Video of the Year
award at MTV's Video Music Awards. Lately, Lady Gaga has been having a

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hard time keeping her act "over the top." Wearing a dress made out of
cuts of dead cows is offensive enough to bring comment, but someone
should whisper in her ear that there are more people who are upset by
butchery than who are impressed by itand that means a lot of young

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 people will not be buying her records if she keeps this stuff up. On the
other hand, maybe it was fake and she'll talk about that later. If not,
what's next: the family cat made into a hat? Meat is the decomposing flesh
of a tormented animal who didn't want to die, and after a few hours under
the TV lights, it would smell like the rotting flesh it is and likely be
crawling in maggotsnot too attractive, really. The stunt is bringing lots
of people to PETA.org to download a copy of our vegetarian/vegan starter
kit, so I guess we should be glad.

http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2010/09/13/Lady-Gagas-
Meat-Dress.aspx


Analyze the texture of the above text, noting how the strategies used to achieve
cohesion and coherence are different from those used in the news article and
discuss why you think these differences exist. You can use the following
questions to guide your analysis:

What are the most common cohesive devices used in the text? What
kinds of relationships do these devices create among different parts of
the text? Are these relationships clear and logical?

What kind of overall structure does the text have? Is the order in
which information is given in the text important? Do you have to use
any previous knowledge about this kind of text or about the topic of
the text to understand it?

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 C3 ANALYZING GENRES

Analyzing genres involves more than just analyzing the structure of particular
types of texts. It involves understanding how these text types function in social
groups, how they reinforce and reflect the concerns of and social relationships in
these groups, and how they change over time as societies and the groups within
them change. Therefore, analyzing genres requires as much attention to social
context as it does to texts.

Part of this context includes other genres that the genre under consideration is
related to. Genres are related to other genres in a number of different ways. First,
actions or communicative events associated with genres are usually part of
larger chains of events that involve different genres. The personal ads we looked
at in the Section B3, for example, might be followed by letters or emails, phone
calls and dinner dates. And so, just as moves in a genre are often arranged in a
kind of sequential structure, genres themselves are also often related to one
another in sequential chains based on the ways they are employed by people as
they work to achieve larger communicative purposes.

Genres are also related to other genres in non-sequential relationships that are
called networks. A job application letter, for example is related to the job ad that
prompted it, the applicants rsum which might accompany the letter, and any
letters of reference former employers or teachers of the applicant might have
written in support of the application. The letter is also related to the letters of all
of the other applicants who are applying for the same job. Genres are said to be
linked together in networks when they have some sort of intertextual
relationship with one another, that is, when one genre makes reference to
another genre or when the users of a genre need to make reference to another
genre in order to realize the communicative purpose for which the genre is
intended.

Genres can also be seen as existing in larger genre ecologies in which texts that
are not directly related to one another in chains or networks can nevertheless
affect one another in sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic ways. Like
natural ecologies, genre ecologies are not static: conditions change; old discourse
communities dissolve and new ones form; and genres change and evolve as users
creatively bend or blend them, or else become extinct if they can no longer fulfill
the communicative goals of their users. Online personal ads, for example, are fast
replacing print-based personal ads because they offer users more efficient ways
to fulfill their communicative goals. Similarly, online news sources are giving rise
to changes in print-based news magazines, many of which now contain shorter TM
articles and more pictures in imitation of their online counterparts.

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Genre analysis, therefore, must account not just for the way a particular genre is
structured and its function in a particular discourse community, but also the
dynamic nature of the genre, how it has and continues to evolve in response to
changing social conditions, the relationships it has to other genres past and

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 present, and the multiple functions it might serve in multiple discourse
communities.

One particularly good example of the dynamic nature of genres and their
adaptability to different discourse communities and different communicative
purposes is the genre of the weblog or blog. Technically a blog is simply a
dynamic web page that is frequently updated with entries appearing in reverse
chronological order. Since the introduction of blogs in the mid 1990s, however,
they have developed certain conventionalized features: blog entries, for example,
are typically short, written in an informal style, and often contain links to other
blogs, web pages or online content such as videos. Blogs also often contain
features such as opportunities for readers to comment, blogrolls (a list of
hyperlinks to related blogs) and permalinks (hyperlinks that point to specific
entries or forums contained in the blogs archives).

Like the personal advertisements analyzed in the last section, the genre of the
blog also contains many sub-genres used by different discourse communities for
different communicative purposes. There are, for example, art blogs and photo
blogs and video blogs and microblogs, just to mention a few varieties. Scholars of
this genre, however, have identified two broad types of blogs: the filter-type and
the diary-type. These two types have different conventions associated with them
and tend to serve different discourse communities.

Filter-type blogs are blogs whose main purpose is to deliver to readers news
stories and links to other media which are filtered based on readers presumed
membership in a particular discourse community (usually characterized by
things like political beliefs, lifestyle, or profession). Below (figure C3.1) is an
entry from one of these types of blogs called The Daily Dish, a political blog
moderated by the commentator Andrew Sullivan from 2006 to 2011, which
advocated socially progressive and fiscally conservative views.

This entry illustrates many of the moves typical of entries in filter-type blogs.
They usually begin with a title, followed by information about when the entry
was published (Date/Time) and who wrote it (Author). The body typically
begins with an introduction to the material that will be linked to, quoted or
embedded, as well as some kind of comment on the material. Introducing and
commenting moves are sometimes realized separately, but sometimes, as in this
example, they are realized together (A powerful video of a man standing up for
his mothers.) The most important move in entries in filter-type blogs is that of
pointing readers to some news, information or media external to the blog itself.
This is sometimes done with a hyperlink, sometimes with a quote from the
original source, sometimes with some embedded media (such as a photograph or
a video), and sometimes with a combination of these methods. All three methods TM
are present in the example below. Some sort of attribution of the original source
or author of the material is also usually included. Finally, such entries also

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commonly include tools at the end which give readers a chance to comment on
the entry or to share it through email or social media like Facebook.

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Figure C3.1 From The Daily Dish

As was noted above, the main communicative purpose of this type of blog entry
is to filter or select content from other websites that may be of interest to
readers of a particular blog. It is this process of selection, along with the
perspective that the blogger takes on the selected content that acts to define
membership in the particular discourse community that the blog serves. By
linking to this particular story, embedding this particular video, and referring to
it as powerful and to the speaker as a man standing up for his mothers, the
author of this entry constructs the discourse community which this blog serves
as made up of people who are likely to support marriage rights for same sex
couples. At the same time, readers of the blog who choose to share this entry
are also likely to share it with other like-minded people. For this reason, critics of
filter-type blogs have pointed out that, rather than encouraging political debate,
they tend to act as echo-chambers in which members of discourse communities
simply communicate among themselves and reinforce one anothers opinions.
Diary-type blogs tend to follow a slightly different structure and include different
kinds of moves. The example below is from the blog of a young woman from TM
Singapore attending Brown University in the United States.

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Figure C3.2 From Dont Make Me Mad (Cheryn-ann Chews blog)

As in filter-type blogs, diary-type blog entries begin with a title and the date and
time the entry was written. Sometimes, as in this entry, they do not contain the
authors name since all of the entries in the blog are by the same author. The
move structure of diary-type blogs tends to be more open and unpredictable
than in filter-type blogs, since the purpose is for the author to reflect on an
experience, thought or memory, and this reflection may take the form of a
narrative, an analysis or even an argument. In the example above, the blogger
begins by introducing the topic she is going to be writing about, then goes on to
give some evaluative comment on this topic, and then goes on to offer some
elaboration or details about the topic. Diary-type blogs also sometimes include
embedded media, usually in the form of digital photographs.

As with filter-type blog entries, the communicative purpose of these entries, to
share personal experiences, thoughts and impressions, helps to define the
discourse community. Although anyone can read such blogs, they are primarily
intended for the authors friends and serve the function of developing and TM
strengthening personal relationships. It is, in fact, the often intensely personal
nature of the material in such blogs expressed in a public forum that makes this

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genre particularly unique.

This focus on creating solidarity within a particular discourse community, then,
is something that both filter-type and diary-type blogs share. Often this is

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 facilitated through processes like commenting and linking to blogs and blog
entries posted by other members of the community. These practices of
commenting and linking also serve to uphold the norms of the community and
police its membership, communicating things like approval, acceptance and
shared values. Although links or references to other texts are not as central a
part of diary-type blogs as they are of filter-type blogs, they do occur. In the
example above, for example, the author refers to pictures posted on her
Facebook page.

Thus blog entries exist in an intertextual relationship with other texts and other
genres. They are sequentially linked in chains to previously posted entries and
are often entrained to a sequence of external events, whether it is an unfolding
news story or the unfolding personal life of the blogger. They form networks
with other texts like entries on other blogs, web pages, social media sites, stories
in online newspapers and YouTube videos. They are also part of wider ecologies
of texts and relationships within discourse communities and societies, often
playing an important part in the management of social networks or in public
debates about important events or political issues.

Blogs also have a complex evolutionary history and relationship with older
genres. Although blogger Rebecca Blood (2000) insists that blogs are the
internets first native genre, other scholars have pointed out their relationship
to older genres. Diary-type blogs, for example, fulfill some of the communicative
functions previously fulfilled by handwritten journals, travel logs, personal
letters, and personal web pages; and filter-type blogs draw on the traditions of
press clipping services, news digests, edited anthologies, newspaper editorials
and letters to the editor. Many scholars therefore consider blogs to be a hybrid
genre, the result of a creative blending of multiple other genres made possible by
new technology.


Find additional examples online

Activity

Because of their short history and the multiple purposes to which they can be
put, the conventions and constraints associated with blogs are difficult to pin
down. Even the distinction between filter-type blogs and diary-type blogs
discussed here is not hard and fast; many blog entries combine features of both
types.

The advantage of analyzing blogs is that they give us an opportunity to observe
TM a
newly emerging and dynamic genre, which has the potential to fulfill many
different kinds of communicative purposes for many different kinds of discourse

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communities. In order to understand something about this variety, go to a blog
directory like Technorati.com (http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/) and
compare entries from blogs from two different categories. The categories listed

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 in Technorati include: entertainment, business, sports, politics, autos,
technology, living, green and science.

Use the following questions to guide your analysis:

What are the discourse communities these blogs serve? How do you
know? In what ways do they fulfill Swaless defining characteristics of
a discourse community (see D3) and in what ways do they deviate
from these defining characteristics? How do the blogs you have chosen
contribute to defining and maintaining these discourse communities?
What are the communicative purposes of these blogs? How do they
differ?
How are the move structures of the two entries that you have chosen
similar or different? Do they resemble diary-type blog entries or filter-
type blog entries, or do they constitute a different type altogether?
How do the moves and the ways they are structured contribute to the
realization of the overall communicative purposes of the two entries?
How are the blog entries that you have chosen linked to other texts or
genres in either genre chains or genre networks? How are they
situated within larger textual ecologies? What other genres do they
resemble?

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TM

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 C4 OTHER PEOPLES VOICES

As we have said before, texts are always linked to, draw upon, respond to, and
anticipate other texts. And the ways authors position themselves and their texts
in relation to other authors and other texts contributes significantly to the
version of reality they end up portraying and the ideology they end up
promoting.

There are many different ways authors might represent the words of other
people in their texts. They might, for example, quote them verbatim using some
kind of reporting verb like said or claimed. Sometimes the effect of direct
quotation can be to validate the words of the other person by implying that what
they said or wrote is so important and profound that it is worth repeating word
for word. Ironically, however, this technique can also have the opposite effect,
creating a distance between the author and the words he or she is quoting and
sometimes implying a certain skepticism towards those words a way of saying,
please note that these are not my words. Often in cases of direct quotation, the
reporting word that is used is important in indicating the authors attitude
towards the words being quoted; it is quite a different thing to note something,
to claim something or to admit something.

Another way authors represent the words of other people is to paraphrase (or
summarize) them. This, of course, gives authors much more flexibility in
characterizing these words in ways that support their point of view. Reporting
words are also often important in paraphrases. In fact, sometimes words
characterizing what the other person seems to be doing with his or her words
are used a substitute for the utterance, as when He said, Im terribly sorry. is
glossed as He apologized.

Sometimes authors will employ a mixture of quotation and paraphrase, using
quotation marks only for selected words or phrases. This is most often done
when authors want to highlight particular parts of what has been said either to
validate those words or to express skepticism about them. Quotes that are put
around single words or phrases are sometimes called scare quotes and are
usually a way of saying things like so called or as s/he put it

By far the most common way to appropriate the words of others is by not
attributing them to another person at all, but by simply asserting them as facts.
Such practices have different implications in different contexts. In academic
contexts, for example, they are often considered acts of plagiarism. In most other
contexts, however, such practices are seen as signs that the author of the text
TM has
bought into the ideas promoted by the other person. If a politician says in a
speech, In order to be a secure nation, we must work for energy independence,

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and then the next day a newspaper editorialist asserts, Energy independence is
vital to our national security, without citing the politician as the source of this
idea, chances are that the politician would not accuse the newspaper of
plagiarism, but rather praise it for the wisdom of its editorial staff.

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Finally, often the words and ideas of other people are not directly asserted, but
rather indirectly presumed in texts. Presuppositions are implicit assumptions
about background beliefs that are presented as taken for granted facts. They are
among the main devices authors use to promote their ideological positions. They
are particularly effective in influencing people because they portray ideas as
established truths and preempt opportunities to question or debate them.

Both assertions and presuppositions make the words and ideas represented
more difficult to evaluate because the sources of those words and ideas are
invisible. Like paraphrase, both also open up lots of possibilities for authors to
change, alter, exaggerate, underplay or otherwise distort the words and ideas of
others. On the other hand, assertion and presupposition also make the
relationship between the author and the person whose words he or she is
borrowing more ambiguous. The discourse analyst can never be certain of how
conscious authors are of the source of these ideas in the discourse of others or
certain of who these others are.

Table C4.1 gives examples of these different forms of discourse representation.

Table C4.1 Different forms of discourse representation

Direct quotation The councilwoman said, because of
unforeseen circumstances, we will be
revising the planned completion date
of the project.

Paraphrase The councilwoman said that the
project would be delayed.

Selective quotation The councilwoman admitted that the
completion date of the project would
have to be revised.

Assertion The project is experiencing severe
delays.

Presupposition Unreasonable delays have plagued the
project.

Whose islands are these? TM

As an example of the way authors represent the words, actions and ideas of other
people and how these representations promote certain versions of reality,

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consider the newspaper article below published on the website of CNN in 2009.
The article concerns a dispute between China and Japan over the sovereignty of a
small group of islands in the South China Sea known by the Chinese as the

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 Diaoyu islands and by the Japanese as the Senkaku islands and efforts by the
U.S. government to mediate in the dispute. Although many people consider news
articles to be relatively objective presentations of the facts of a particular event,
the words reporters use to portray participants and processes, and the way they
choose to represent what relevant parties say about the event almost always
promotes a particular ideological stance.


China shuns U.S. mediation in its island dispute with Japan

By the CNN Wire Staff
November 3, 2010 -- Updated 0401 GMT (1201 HKT)

(CNN) -- The United States can forget about hosting trilateral talks involving
China and Japan over the disputed islands, Beijing said via state media
Wednesday.

"The territorial dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands is the
business of the two nations only," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said,
according to the Xinhua news agency.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the offer during discussions with
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi last week, Xinhua said.

Relations between Beijing and Tokyo have been strained by their growing
dispute over the islands, which China calls the Diaoyu and Japan calls the
Senkaku.

Japan in early September arrested a Chinese fishing crew off the islands, leading
to a diplomatic battle.

In response, China made increasingly aggressive diplomatic threats. Beijing also
halted ministerial-level talks with Tokyo, and both sides canceled trips to each
other's nations.

Japan has since released the fishing crew, but Beijing has repeatedly said the
islands belong to China.

Beijing also says most of the South China Sea belongs to China, disputing
neighboring countries' claims. The clash over territorial waters and islands --
and the natural resources that go with them -- is a flashpoint in the Asia-Pacific
region.
TM
From: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-
03/world/china.japan.disputed.islands_1_island-dispute-diaoyu-islands-beijing-

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and-tokyo?_s=PM:WORLD

The first thing that we can notice about this version of the facts is the different
kinds of processes the different parties are portrayed as engaging in. China

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 (meaning the Chinese government) is described as shunning mediation, making
threats and halting talks, whereas the U.S. (in the person of the Secretary of
State) is described as making an offer and wishing to host talks. Clearly, the
U.S. side is portrayed as the more reasonable and conciliatory of the two parties.
The portrayal of Japan is more neutral: although it is portrayed as arresting a
Chinese fishing crew, later it is portrayed as releasing the crew.

Apart from the processes associated with the different actors, the ways the
words of those actors are represented also reinforce the impression that China
acted aggressively. In the first paragraph, the words of the Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesperson are paraphrased in a way that gives them an aggressive,
argumentative tone: The United States can forget about hosting trilateral talks.
From the direct quotation that is given in the next paragraph, however, it is clear
that this is not at all what the spokesperson said. The article does not quote nor
give much detail about what the U.S. Secretary of State said that led to this
response other than characterizing it as an offer. Whether it was an offer
however or something else such as a threat or a warning is clearly open to
interpretation given the Chinese response.

The final paragraphs of the article give background information about the
situation in the form of multiple assertions and presuppositions whose sources
the reader cannot be certain of. It is asserted, for example, that China has made
increasingly aggressive diplomatic threats, although it is not clear why their
actions have been characterized in such a way or by whom. In the last paragraph,
the seemingly objective statement, the clash over the territorial waters and the
islands and the natural resources that go with them is a flashpoint in the Asia-
Pacific region, hides within it the presupposition that the motivation behind the
disputes is primarily economic rather than a matter of patriotism or the
historical legitimacy of the claims.


Find additional examples online

Activity

The article below, published in the China Daily, gives a rather different version of
events. Try to analyze it in the same way, noting how different participants and
processes are characterized, how the words of different actors are represented,
and how these features in the text contribute to its ideological stance.

China: Trilateral talks merely US wishful thinking
TM
(Xinhua) Updated: 2010-11-02 14:54

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BEIJING - Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Tuesday it is
merely wishful thinking of the United States to propose hosting official talks
between China, Japan and the US.

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 Ma made the remarks when asked to comment on a hearsay that the US side has
told the Chinese side that it is willing to host trilateral talks between China, Japan
and the United States to impel China and Japan to exchange views on a series of
issues.

"I'd like to clarify the discussions between Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi
and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Hanoi last week," said Ma.

He said both sides discussed strengthening cooperation between China, Japan
and the United States, so as to work together for the peace and development of
the Asia-Pacific region.

He noted the US side proposed holding official trilateral talks between China,
Japan and the United States.

"I'd like to stress that this is only the thinking of the US side," he said.

He said China is looking at making full use of all current dialogue and
cooperation mechanisms in the Asia-Pacific region with the hope of making them
more effective in promoting peace and development in the region.

"The Diaoyu Islands and their adjacent islets are an inalienable part of China's
territory and the territorial dispute over the islands is an issue between China
and Japan," said the spokesman.

"It is absolutely wrong for the United States to repeatedly claim the Diaoyu
Islands fall within the scope of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and
Security. What the United States should do is to immediately correct its wrong
position," Ma said.

"Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and China's foreign ministry have made
clear many times on various occasions China's solemn stance," he added.

After her meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara in Hawaii last
Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed the Diaoyu Islands issue
could invoke the US-Japan security treaty.

The Chinese government was strongly dissatisfied with her statement.

Ma said Friday that as a bilateral agreement reached during the Cold War, the
US-Japan security treaty should not harm the interests of third parties, including
China.
TM
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-11/02/content_11491199.htm

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 C5 ANALYZING SPEECH ACTS

In this section we will consider how principles from pragmatics and
conversation analysis can be applied to understanding how people make sense of
potentially ambiguous contributions in social interaction. The two types of
contributions we will focus on are apologies and threats. Apologies are
potentially ambiguous because, although they are often accompanied by rather
explicit language like Im sorry or I apologize, this language, in the absence of
other things like an assumption of responsibility or a promise not to repeat the
offending action, is sometimes not enough to make the apology felicitous.
Furthermore, words like Im sorry are sometimes used in cases where no
apology is intended at all. Threats are potentially ambiguous because people
often issue them in an indirect fashion in order to avoid legal or moral
accountability, and because, in some situations, people might interpret
utterances as threats, when they were not intended as such.

Interpreting apologies

Apologies are among the most studied kind of speech act. Despite this, because of
the complexity and context-dependent nature of apologies, there is still
considerable disagreement among scholars as to the conditions that must be
present to make an apology felicitous. Part of the reason for this is that people
themselves vary considerably in terms of what they require to be satisfied by
anothers attempt at apologizing in different situations. Consider the following
conversation);

A: You forgot!
B: Yes. I am sorry.
A: You're always doing it.
B: I know.
(from Schegloff 1988)

As analysts looking at this conversation with no knowledge of the context in
which it takes place, we must rely on the sequential placement of the utterances
in order to make sense of what the speakers mean by their words. In particular,
the phrase I am sorry in Bs utterance in the second line helps us to make sense
of As previous utterance (You forgot) as a complaint rather than as simply an
assertion. At the very least, we can be sure that B has taken this utterance to be a
complaint. Furthermore, coming as it does after a statement about his or her own
behavior (You forgot!), rather than a statement about something or somebody TM
else (like Its raining), we are able to interpret Bs statement I am sorry as an
apology rather than an expression sympathy. Finally, we are able to interpret Bs
statement as an apology because A appears to interpret in that way.

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At the same time, however, A does not fully accept Bs apology: rather than
saying something like, Its okay, he or she makes yet another assertion (Youre

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 always doing it), which we also interpret as a complaint, or rather, an
elaboration on the first complaint. This is not the preferred response to an
apology (which is an acceptance of the apology) and thus leads B to infer that
further work has to be performed on the apology front. Thus Bs next
contribution, I know, is offered not as a simple statement of fact or agreement
but as a further admission of guilt, an elaboration of the original apology.

The important thing to notice about this exchange is that the statement I am
sorry is apparently not sufficient to successfully perform the apology. In the first
instance it is also accompanied by an acknowledgement of fault (Yes), but even
this is not enough to elicit As acceptance of the apology. B is also required to
acknowledge an even greater fault (that his or her forgetting is not a
momentary lapse but a habitual behavior). Therefore, even when an utterance
seems to satisfy a set of objective conditions for an apology, there is no
guarantee that it will be accepted as such by the recipient.

A number of scholars have attempted to formulate the felicity conditions for
apologies. Owen (1983), for example, offers this simple set of criteria:

The act A specified in the propositional content is an offence against
addressee H
H would have preferred Ss not doing A to Ss doing A and S believes H
would have preferred Ss not doing A to his doing A
A does not benefit H and S believes A does not benefit H
S regrets (is sorry for) having done A
(the utterance) counts as an expression of regret by S for having done A.

There are at least two potential problems with this set of conditions. The first is
that the propositional content of apologies (what is being apologized for) is often
not explicitly stated in the apology itself but rather implied based on some
pervious action or utterance, and when it is stated, even if it represents an
offence against the addressee, it may not be exactly the offence for which the
addressee is seeking an apology. B in the above example might say, Im sorry for
upsetting you, which is quite different from saying Im sorry I forgot.

The second problem has to do with what needs to be done in order for the
utterance to count as an expression of regret. As we saw above, the utterance I
am sorry, which is clearly an expression of regret, is not always sufficient to
accomplish an apology. At the same time, there are many instances in which
regret is expressed which would not be considered apologies. For example, a job
applicant might receive a letter with the sentence, we regret to inform you that
your application has not been accepted. Even though this is an explicit
expression of regret, and the addressee might indeed regard the rejection aTM s an
offense, few people would regard this as a true apology.

Cohen, Olshtain and Rosenstein (1986) have pointed out that apologies often

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involve one or more of the following verbal strategies:

an expression of apology (I am sorry)

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 an explanation or account of the situation (Ive had a lot on my mind
lately)
an acknowledgement of responsibility (I know)
an offer of repair (how can I make it up to you?)
a promise of forbearance (Ill never do it again)

The perfect apology, in fact, contains all of these elements, even when some or
most of them are implicit rather than stated outright. For something to have the
force of the apology, however, only one of these strategies is necessary. In some
cases in which only one strategy is used, however, the speaker leaves it up to the
addressee to infer that an apology has been made by referring to the
conversational maxims. I might, for example, say I feel terrible about shouting at
you yesterday, flouting the maxim of relevance (my internal state of mind may
not seem directly relevant to our conversation), leading my interlocutor to take
the statement as implying something more than a simple assertion.
In many cases, however, addressees require more than one of the above
strategies to be used in order to be satisfied that the apology is complete and
sincere.

Activity

One of the most famous disagreements regarding the speech act of apologizing
began on April 1, 2001 when a US spy plane flying without permission in Chinese
airspace collided with a Chinese fighter jet, causing it to crash and killing the
pilot, before making an emergency landing on Hainan island. The Chinese
authorities detained the crew of the US plane for eleven days while they waited
for the U.S. to apologize for illegally entering their airspace and causing the
death of the pilot. The incident ended when the U.S. government issued what has
come to be known as the letter of the two sorries. Many on both the U.S. and
Chinese sides insisted, however, that the two sorries expressed in the letter
were not true apologies.

The two sorries were:

1) Both President Bush and Secretary of State Powell have expressed
their sincere regret over your missing pilot and aircraft. Please convey to
the Chinese people and to the family of pilot Wang Wei that we are very
sorry for their loss.

2) We are very sorry the entering of Chinese air space and the landing did
not have verbal clearance, but are pleased the crew landed safely.
(United States Government, 2001) TM

Based on Owens felicity conditions for an apology and Cohen and his colleagues
list of strategies, decide whether or not you think these sorries constitute true

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apologies. Give reasons for your decision. You should particularly consider:

1) if the propositional content referred to matches with the offenses perceived
by the Chinese side;

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 3) if enough of the strategies for apologizing are expressed or implied to make
the apologies convincing.

Interpreting threats

Threats suffer from a similar ambiguity as apologies because people often
depend a great deal on implicature when issuing them. Consequently, as with
apologies, how they are interpreted by those to whom they are issued matters a
great deal.

In some ways the felicity conditions for threatening are quite similar to those for
promising, warning and advising. All of these speech acts have to do with
something that will or will not happen in the future, depending on whether or
not certain conditions are met. In fact, very often words like promise, advise and
warn are used to issue threats, as in:

Im warning you. If I see you around here again, I promise you, Ill kill you.

and

If you value your life, I advise you to pay what you owe.

The main differences between a threat and these other three speech acts are that
1) unlike a promise, what is threatened is harmful rather than beneficial to the
addressee, 2) unlike a warning, the action requested is for the benefit of the
speaker rather than the addressee, and, 3) unlike advice, the speaker takes his or
her own perspective not the hearers and he or she controls the outcome rather
than the hearer.

The linguist Roger Shuy summarizes these differences in the following table:

Table C5.1 Comparison of threatening, warning, advising and promising (adapted
from Shuy 1993: 98)

Threatening Warning Advising Promising
To the
speakers
benefit
To the
hearers
benefit
To the TM
hearers
detriment
From

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speakers
perspective
From hearers

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 perspective
Speaker
controls
outcome
Hearer
controls
outcome

Activity

Roger Shuy is a forensic linguist, the kind of language expert who is sometimes
called upon by courts and law enforcement officers to make judgments about
what people meant, in order to determine if they have committed a crime. In his
book Language Crimes (1993) he relates the case of a man named Don Tyner
who was accused of making threats to a business associate named Vernon Hyde
who resigned from his organization after securing ownership of a number of
shares in a racehorse. After Hydes resignation, Tyner repeatedly contacted Hyde
and accused him of lying and swindling his company. Hyde interpreted these
accusations as threats, though Tyner repeatedly denied threatening Hyde. On
one occasion, after Hyde had accused Tyner of threatening him several times, the
following exchange occurred:

Tyner: Hows David?
Hyde: Do what?
Tyner: Hows David?
Hyde: You mean my son?
Tyner: Yep.
Hyde: Don, dont threaten my son. Do a lot of things but dont ever
threaten my son.
Tyner: I didnt threaten anybody, I just said, Hows David?
(from Shuy 1993:109)

Without more complete evidence, of course, it is impossible to determine
whether or not Tyner was really threatening Hyde or his son. Instead, consider
what you think might have led Hyde to interpret the statement Hows David as a
threat based your knowledge of:
1) the cooperative principle and conversational maxims;
2) The felicity conditions for a threat.

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 C6 ANALYZING CONVERSATIONAL STRATEGIES

In this section we will further explore the strategies we use to manage
relationships (face) and activities (frames) in interaction. The kinds of
interaction we will use as examples in this section, however, are not from face-
to-face conversations, but rather from computer-mediated interactions, in
particular, interactions using Facebook and MSN Messenger.

As we have explained, mediated interactions are different from face-to-face
spoken conversations in a number of ways. For one thing, in much computer-
mediated communication, people type their utterances rather than speaking
them. In addition, these interactions rarely involve the same kind of synchrony
that face-to-face conversation does. Whereas face-to-face interactions occur in
real time, giving us access to others peoples utterances as they are forming
them, most computer mediated interaction is asynchronous, involving a time
lag between production and reception, whether it be the momentary lag
between the time when one party types a message and the other person reads it
which we experience in instant messaging or the much longer time lags
associated with email, blogs and social networking sites.

Perhaps the most important difference between face-to-face interaction and
computer-mediated interaction is that many of the non-verbal and paralinguistic
resources available in face-to-face communication are not available in text based
computer mediated communication. This is significant because these are
precisely the resources people often use as contextualization cues to frame their
conversational activities, and they can also play an important role in the face
strategies of involvement and independence. Users of text based communication
tools, then, need to make use of different resources such as graphics, emoticons,
orthography and punctuation to fulfill the functions that non-verbal and
paralinguistic communication do in face-to-face encounters.

Face strategies on Facebook

Perhaps more than any other kind of computer-mediated communication, social
networking sites are designed to give users tools to communicate about and
manage their social relationships with others. Facebook is about face precisely
in the sense in which we defined it in Section A6: the negotiated public image
mutually granted to each other by participants in a communicative event. Users
of Facebook are centrally concerned with constructing and maintaining their
public images, with saving face, and with giving face to others. TM

It is not uncommon for people to have many Facebook friends (hundreds or
even thousands), and yet they do not enjoy the same kind of relationships with

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all of these friends: with some of them they are socially close, and with others
they are socially distant; some of them are their social equals, while others are in
a hierarchical relationship with them. The problem with Facebook, however, is

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 that it is biased towards a face system of symmetrical solidarity. Nearly all of the
resources it makes available, from the initial mechanism of friending, to photo
sharing, to the exchange of virtual tokens like pokes and vampire bites are
designed to express involvement. Some (see for example Kiesler 1986, Landow
1992) have even suggested that it is a fundamental characteristic of all
computer-mediated communication that it flattens hierarchies and encourages
self-disclosure, a phenomenon Joseph Walther (1996) calls hyperpersonal
communication.

For some users this is not a problem the whole point of a social networking
site for them is to help them get closer to those in their social network and it
certainly is not a problem for the company that runs Facebook since the more
people share with one another using involvement strategies, the more
information about them is available to sell to advertisers. It does become a
problem, however, when people who are accustomed to hierarchical or
deference face systems in face-to-face communication have to negotiate their
relationships in an environment that is biased towards involvement, as when
students and professors or employees and employers become friends.

These difficulties are especially salient in wall posts, since these constitute
publically performed conversations which people who are not involved in
typically have access to. Therefore, the relationships people enact in these
interactions are not just negotiated between the interactants, but also displayed
to a larger audience.

The example below (figure C6.1) illustrates how one of my students strategically
mixed independence and involvement strategies when tagging me in a picture
in her photo album.

Figure C6.1 Excerpt from the authors Facebook Wall

The first thing that should be noted regarding this example is that tagging
someone in a photo on Facebook is a clear example of involvement. Not only TM
does it assume a relationship of solidarity, but also makes the assumption that
the person tagged does not mind advertising this relationship to other users.

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Consequently, it is also a threat to the negative face of the person who has been
tagged, potentially violating their desire for autonomy and privacy. There are
also other instances of involvement in this example, such as the optimistic and
complimentary message, the informal language and the use of emoticons (like :)

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 and :D) and unconventional spelling and punctuation (like ur, jokessssss, and
the repetition of the exclamation point at the end of the message).

At the same time, there are also instances of independence strategies, most
notably the use of the title Prof. Jones to address me. What is interesting about
this is that, like many university professors, I am on a first name basis with my
students. In other words, this student uses an independence strategy on
Facebook which she probably would not use in face-to-face interaction with me.
One reason for this may be to compensate for the involvement strategies that
otherwise dominate the message and to mitigate the potential threat to my
negative face.

Find additional examples online

Activity

Analyze the postings on Facebook or some other social network service you use.
Does this service encourage the adoption of a particular face system among
users? Do the people in your network (including yourself) use different mixtures
of independence and involvement strategies when interacting with people with
whom they have different kinds of relationships? In particular, how do people
who are socially distant or who are in hierarchal relationships manage face
strategies? Can you find examples of interactions which would have been
managed differently had they taken place face-to-face?

Contextualization cues in instant messaging

As we have said above, text-based computer mediated communication differs
from face-to-face conversation in that users do not have access to many of the
resources normally used to issue contextualization cues, such as body language,
facial expressions and paralinguistic signals. As a result, they have, over the
years, developed a multitude of other ways with which to frame and reframe
their utterances, including emoticons, screen names, status updates,
unconventional spelling, creative use of punctuation, and code-mixing (the
mixing of words from different languages). A number of scholars (see for
example Danet et al. 1997, Herring 2001) have shown how users of chat and
instant messaging systems use such cues to signal whats going on in online
interaction.

Speakers of Chinese like many of the students I teach in Hong Kong also have
TMat
their disposal written final particles, sounds that often occur at the end of
spoken utterances which signal the speakers attitude towards the utterance or
the hearer, which users of chat and instant messaging programs regularly insert

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(often in Romanized form) in their written messages (though they hardly ever
appear in more formal written Chinese).

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 Below is an example of how such resources can be used as contextualization cues
in instant messaging exchanges. It is an excerpt from a conversation between
two university students in Hong Kong, one a female named Tina, and the other a
male named Barnett.

Barnett: u're....~?!
Tina: tina ar.......
Tina: a beautiful girl........
Tina: haha...
Tina: ^_^
Barnett: ai~
Barnett: i think i'd better leave right now....^o^!

The conversation starts out with Barnett asking for clarification of Tinas
identity. The tilde (~) here signifies a lengthening of the previous utterance,
giving it a playful, insistent quality. Tina replies with her name, followed by a
Romanized final particle (ar), which in Cantonese is often used to soften
affirmative statements so they do not sound too abrupt, followed by a number of
ellipsis marks () indicating that there is more to come. In her next message she
elaborates on her identity, referring to herself as a beautiful girl, which might be
interpreted as either a boast or an attempt at seduction. In her next two
messages, however, she puts a joking frame around her previous description
with the words haha and a smiling emoticon (^_^). Barnett replies with ai a
Romanization of the Cantonese word , often used as an expression of pain,
frustration or indignation, which he lengthens with a tilde (~) in the same way it
might be if spoken in a particularly exaggerated way. He then adds, in the next
message, that he thinks he had better leave the conversation, but reframes this as
a playful threat with the humorous emoticon ^o^ , which represents the face of a
clown.

What is going on in this short exchange, of course, has very little to do with Tina
giving an objective appraisal of her looks or even boasting, or with Barnett
expressing concern and threatening to terminate the conversation. Instead, this
is clearly an episode of playful teasing or flirting. Without the contextualization
cues supplied by such things as punctuation, emoticons, and tokens like haha,
however, the conversation would take on a very different meaning.

Activity

a. Choose an utterance which you might send to your friend via instant
messaging such as u finish hw? (have you finished the homework?) and discuss
how the message could be framed differently (as, for example, a warning, TM an
offer, a boast, a complaint, a sympathetic remark, etc.) by attaching to it one of
the emoticons from the range of default choices offered by MSN Messenger

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(Figure C6.2).

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Fig C6.2 MSN Messenger emoticons

b. Save an instant messaging conversation as a history file and analyze it in
terms of how things like code choice, spelling, punctuation, capitalization and
emoticons are used to strategically frame and re-frame messages.

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 C7 ANALYZING CONTEXTS

Analyzing the communicative competence members of a particular speech
community bring to a particular speech event requires more than just the
analysis of texts or transcripts (though one can often tell a lot from such an
analysis). It requires observing people interacting in the speech event and
talking to them about what they think they need to know in order to participate
in it successfully. Often one must talk with multiple participants in order to find
out what it is like for people playing different roles in the event.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson and the psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch (Ruesch
and Bateson 1968) say that there are at least four kinds of information an
ethnographer should gather: 1) members generalizations (what participants
think other people need to know and do to participate in the speech event); 2)
individual experiences (the specific, concrete knowledge and experiences of
individual people who have participated in the speech event in the past); 3)
objective observation (the observation of people participating in the speech
event); and 4) the analysts comparison of what he or she has observed and
heard from participants with his or her own knowledge and behavior in similar
speech events in his or her own speech community. Sometimes these different
kinds of information contradict one another: participants, for example, may
attribute certain behavior to other members of their speech community but say
that they themselves do things differently, or they may say they behave in a
particular way but can be observed behaving in an entirely different way. The
important thing for the analyst is not to privilege any of these four kinds of
information, but to take them together in order to get a full picture of what is
going on from the point of view of the participants. It is important to remember
that the ethnographer of speaking is less interested in what is objectively
occurring in a speech event as in what participants think is occurring and what
they need to know to participate as legitimate members of their group.

The greatest danger in using a model like Hymess SPEAKING model is that the
analyst simply describes the expectations participants have regarding each of the
components in a rather mechanical way, like filling out a check list, without
offering much in the way of analysis. While this can at least provide a general
idea of how the speech event happens, it does not tell us very much about why it
happens the way it does. The analyst cannot stop at just describing the various
components, but also needs to ask 1) why different components have particular
expectations associated with them, 2) how the expectations associated with
different components interact and affect one another, and 3) why certain
components seem more important and other components less important tTM o
participants.

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Below are some useful tips to help you avoid falling into the trap of mechanical
description:

Compare and contrast

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 One way to really understand whether the communicative competencies you
have uncovered through your analysis are really significant is to compare and
contrast different speech events or the different experiences and perspectives of
different participants engaged in the same speech event. One of the reasons
Ruesch and Bateson recommend that analysts compare the speech event they
are studying with one that is more familiar to them is to help them to better
notice those aspects of the speech event which they might be misunderstanding
or taking for granted,

Be specific

It is important for the analyst to be as specific as possible in his or her
description of the expectations people have about the different components. This
sometimes involves asking probing questions or observing what people say or
do carefully, paying close attention to detail.

Remember that all components are not equal

One of the most important things an analyst will want to notice is that
participants may regard the expectations governing some components to be
stricter than those governing others, and that some behavior might be regarded
as more or less compulsory, while other behavior might be regarded as
optional. It is also important to note how expectations regarding one
component can affect the kinds of expectations participants have about other
components. In other words, it is important to notice which kinds of behavior
tend to co-occur in speech events (for example, the genre of a joke may tend to
co-occur with a humorous or light-hearted key).

Explore transgressions

One good way to understand what people are expected to do in a particular
situation is to find out what happens when they fail to do what they are expected
to do. This is because, while appropriate behavior usually passes unremarked
upon, inappropriate behavior is often an occasion for participants to explicitly
discuss their otherwise tacit assumptions and expectations. Therefore, noticing
or talking with participants about mistakes, transgressions, inappropriate
behavior or incompetence can be a good way to clarify what they regard as
appropriate and why.

Don't Bite My Shit

TM
It would be impossible to conduct a full ethnographic analysis of a speech event
in the space remaining in this section. What I can do, however, is discuss the
meaning and significance of a particular utterance in the social and cultural

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context in which it occurs. The utterance, one which I heard frequently during
my ethnographic study of urban skateboarders in Hong Kong (reported in Jones
2008), is: Hey man, dont bite my shit. I heard this utterance or some variation
of it many times during my fieldwork, sometimes uttered in a playful manner,

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 and sometimes with deadly seriousness. In order to understand the meaning of
the utterance and the kinds of cultural expectations that underpin it, it is
necessary to understand something about the cultural context in which it occurs.

Skateboarding in Hong Kong, as in most places, takes place within the context of
a speech situation, which we can call a skate session. These sessions usually
occur at skate parks, but sometimes occur in other places such as on sidewalks,
in parking lots and in city squares. Skaters regard the skating that goes on in
parks and that which goes on in these other places to be two different genres of
skating, one which is called park skating and the other is called street skating.
In Hong Kong, park skating always occurs during the day when the skate parks
are open, and street skating almost always occurs at night when fewer people
are around to interfere with the activity. Skate sessions can last many hours and
sometimes involve skaters moving from setting to setting. They may, for
example, begin a session in the skate park in the afternoon, and then move to the
street after the skate park closes.

Skaters generally participate in skate sessions in crews or posses, groups of
people who usually skate together and who often share a certain style of
dressing or acting (for example punk or hip-hop) and are usually of a similar
level of skill. People hardly ever skate alone. One reason for this is that among
the main aims of a skating session is to let others witness one performing daring
or difficult tricks. This aim of making oneself as spectacle for others is reinforced
by the the fact that they often bring video cameras with them during skate
sessions to film one another.

At a skate park at any given time there are likely to be multiple crews, and one
of the core competencies for members of this community is understanding how
to manage the use of space in order to avoid conflicts among crews. In street
skating sessions these conflicts can sometimes become intense if one crew
claims the exclusive right to skate at a particular spot and tries to deny access to
other crews. At skate parks, this does not happen since these parks are public
property and the rights for all skaters to use them is policed by park attendants
and security guards. Therefore, different crews must cooperate and carefully
negotiate the use of space.

Skate sessions normally consist of multiple speech events including
conversations, horseplay, games of SKATE (a highly structured game in which
skaters compete in performing tricks) and doing lines. Doing lines involves
skaters taking turns executing lines upon various obstacles (such as rails, stairs
and ramps). A line is one or more tricks (most of which have names ollie and
kickflip) done in succession. Skaters work to compose lines which showcase
their skill and imagination. Often members of different crews will occupy TM
different parts of the park and content themselves with different obstacles.
Sometimes, however, people from different crews make use of the same obstacle,

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having to take turns with one another. It is in the mechanism of turn taking
among members of different crews that the notion of biting someones shit
becomes relevant.

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 Biting someones shit in the context of the speech event of doing lines refers
to the action of imitating or repeating the line executed by the previous person in
the queue. The meaning of this action depends crucially on the relationship
between the person who does it and the person whose line has been imitated.
When it is done by a member of a different crew, it can be taken as a challenge or
sign of disrespect a transgression of the rules of etiquette associated with
doing lines. In this case, the utterance Hey man, dont bite my shit, can be
interpreted as a warning or a threat. In cases where the person who bites ones
shit is a member of ones own crew, it can be seen as a matter of friendly
competition or even a way of showing respect for ones crew member by
emulating him. In this case, the utterance Hey man, dont bite my shit, might be
interpreted as teasing. In the context of a different speech event, such as a game
of SKATE, repeating the trick that the previous person has done is expected and
so does not constitute biting someones shit.

The point that this example illustrates is that the meaning of an utterance like
dont bite my shit cannot be interpreted with reference to only one component
of the SPEAKING model, but can only be understood as a matter of the
interaction among multiple components: place, participants, goals, the expected
sequence of acts, the tone in which the utterance is said, the various media
involved in the communication (including things like participants dress and
their skateboards), norms about what constitutes showing respect to others,
and the genrewhether it is park skating or street skating. More importantly,
successful use of and interpretation of this speech act incorporates a complex
range of cultural knowledge regarding the values, identities and norms of
conduct of this particular community of young (mostly male) skateboarders in
Hong Kong.

Find additional examples online

Activity

Choose a speech event in which people that you know normally participate but
with which you are not entirely familiar. Interview the people involved with the
aim of finding out what their expectations are about who should say what to
whom, when, how and why. Ask people both about the kind of communicative
competence most members of their speech community have and about their own
personal competence and their own personal experiences with this particular
speech event. After that, see if you can find occasion to observe people taking
part in this speech event. Notice not just what is said, by who says it, when and
how. Use the components of the SPEAKING model as a guideline for your TM
analysis. Choose a number of phrases or an exchange that you think could not be
fully understood outside of the context of this speech event, and list the kind of

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knowledge people need to have to interpret these utterances correctly.

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 C8 DOING MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

In this section we will explore how to apply the tools of mediated discourse
analysis to the analysis of social actions, social practices and sites of engagement.
The three concepts that we will be working with are:

1) the notion of affordances and constraints: the idea that different kinds of
cultural tools make certain kinds of actions and certain kinds of social identities
associated with those actions either more or less possible;

2) the notion of social practices: the idea that certain actions combined with
other actions and with certain cultural tools come to be regarded as
recognizable social practices and that discourse can play an important role in
maintaining and promoting these social practices;

3) the notion of sites of engagement: the idea that actions take place at the nexus
of cultural tools, social relationships and the experiences, knowledge and skill of
individual social actors, and the way these three elements come together can
help us to understand how a particular social action will be performed.

Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover

In her book The Breakup 2.0, Ilana Gershon discusses how different kinds of
media affect the way people perform the action of breaking up with a romantic
partner and the way they come to regard this action as a particular kind of social
practice. Of course there are many ways this action could be performed. One
might confront the person with whom one wishes to break up face-to-face either
in public or in a private place, call him or her on the telephone, or send what is
known as a Dear John Letter. Technology has introduced a number of new
cultural tools with which to perform this action: one could send an email, for
example, negotiate the breakup using instant messaging or mobile phone based
text messaging, or one could post a message or change ones relationship status
on Facebook.

Gershon interviewed a large number of people about their ideas about and
experiences of breaking up and found that people had very strong feelings about
how the medium used can affect the action of breaking up. In particular, they felt
that people who used the wrong medium risked enacting the wrong kind of
social identity, that is, being considered the wrong kind of person by others.
TM

Activity

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Think about the affordances and constraints of the different kinds of media one
might use to accomplish the action of breaking up. For example, breaking up
face-to-face makes it easier for the person doing the breaking up to gauge the

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 other persons reaction and adapt his or her message accordingly, but it can
make it more difficult to end the conversation (and the relationship) quickly and
easily. This medium also makes it easier for the person being broken up with to
respond and ask for reasons and clarification, but it may make it more difficult
for him or her to hide any feelings of disappointment or sadness that might arise.
Because of these affordances and constraints, people tend to think some media
are better for breaking up than other media and associate different media for
breaking up with different kinds of people.

Fill in the chart below based on your own beliefs and experiences about the
things different media make harder or more difficult to do during the breaking
up process. Then rank the different media in terms of 1) how much you would
prefer to use it if you are breaking up with someone, and 2) how much you
would prefer it to be used if you are the one being broken up with. Note if there
is a difference in your ranking for these two situations. How do you account for
this difference? What does this tell you about the relationship between cultural
tools and social identities?

Compare your answers with those of someone else and discuss if and why you
have different opinions about the kinds of people associated with different media
for breaking up.

Table C8.1 Cultural tools for breaking up

Medium Affordances and Constraints Rank
(1) (2)
Face-to-Face
Conversation

Telephone
Conversation

Letter or Email


Instant
Messaging
Conversation
Text Message


Facebook
Relationship TM
Status

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Of course, most of the time when people engage in a complex social practice like
breaking up with a lover they use a combination of cultural tools, including a
combination of media. They might begin breaking up with a text message,

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 continue the negotiation of the break up through an instant messaging
conversation, and complete the process in a face-to-face meeting.

Think about how the social practice of breaking up is constructed in your social
circle. What smaller actions are usually included in this practice (such as making
an appointment to meet, or apologizing for hurting the other persons feelings)
and how are these usually combined? What sorts of cultural tools (such as
objects, media, genres, social languages, gestures or facial expressions) are used
and how do these tools affect how the practice is accomplished?

Being In a relationship on Facebook

Just as breaking up is a complex social practice, entering into a romantic
relationship with someone can also be complicated. The people involved must
negotiate the point at which they are prepared to express to each other and to
other people that they know that they are in a relationship. This is
accomplished differently in different societies. In North America when I was
growing up, boys usually gave their girlfriends their school ring which the girl
would wear around her neck to announce that she was going steady with the
owner of the ring.

The ways the social practice of entering into a relationship have changed as a
result of new media like Facebook is also a topic Gershon takes up in her book.
Facebook provides a specific tool for people to accomplish the action of
announcing their relationship status to others, allowing them to indicate on
their profiles if they are single, in a relationship, engaged, married, in a civil
union, in a domestic partnership, its complicated, in an open relationship,
widowed, separated, or divorced.

This tool itself comes with a number of obvious affordances and constraints.
While it allows users to indicate that they are in certain kinds of relationships,
for example, it makes it more difficult for them to indicate that they are in other
kinds of relationships that may not be covered by the choices in the drop down
menu. It also makes ambiguity in relationships more difficult by putting social
pressure on users to announce their status to others in their social network.
Gershon talks about the negotiations couples go through about when to make
their relationship Facebook official, as well as the complications that arise when
they end up breaking up and having to decide how and when to change their
relationship status back to single.

The problem is that one cannot fully understand how this cultural tool has
affected the practices of entering into and maintaining romantic relationships TM
just by looking at these choices, because not everybody uses them in the same
way. Different people and groups have different ways of using the relationship
status on Facebook. Some people use it not to announce romantic relationships

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but to avoid having to give information about their romantic entanglements by,
for example, indicating that they are married to their best friend. The only way
to understand how social practices of relationship management have changed

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 because of Facebook is to consider the interaction among the cultural tools the
website makes available, the relationships among the people in a particular
social network, and the knowledge, habits and norms associated with the
historical bodies of specific users.

Activity

Consider your social network on Facebook or some other social networking site
as a site of engagement. Think about how you and your friends use and interpret
the relationship status function (or some other equivalent function on another
site). Analyze how the accomplishment of the social practice of using this
function depends on 1) the affordances and constraints built into the technology
itself, 2) the actual relationships among the people who belong to your social
network, especially those who are associated with each other using this function,
and 3) your own habits, knowledge and experiences associated with this
function.

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 C9 ANALYZING MULTIMODALITY

In this section we will practice applying some of the ideas we introduced in
Sections A9 and B9 to the analysis of multimodality in a text and a face-to-face
interaction. We will try to show how the analysis of multimodality can not just
help us to understand how texts and interactions are structured, by also how
they promote certain ideologies and power relationships.

Multimodal discourse analysis is a complex and rapidly developing field, and it
would be impossible to demonstrate all of the many tools and concepts analysts
have developed for the analysis of things like images, gestures, gaze and posture.
Instead we will introduce a few basic tools and key questions that can guide you
in this kind of analysis and encourage you to refer to the sources in the list of
Further Readings for information on other tools and procedures.

Its nice to be chased

This first example is an advertisement that appeared in the stations of the Mass
Transit Railway in Hong Kong in 2005. It portrays a woman with wings in the
foreground and two men in the background holding butterfly nets. The setting of
the picture seems to be a wooded area reminiscent of the setting of fairly tales,
and this fairly tale feeling is increased by the unconventional dress of the
participants and the wings on the woman's back. Underneath the two men
appears the slogan: Its nice to be chased. Butterfly Bra by Wacoal (figure C9.1).

Figure C9.1 Wacoal Bra advertisement (1) TM


Ideational Function

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This picture contains three participants: one woman and the two men, who are
interacting with one another in a kind of narrative. The image shows one
moment in the story, which the viewer is invited to imagine as part of a more

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 extended (perhaps endless) chase. As a narrative, however, it is interesting
because the main action consists only of gazing; the viewer is asked to infer the
higher-level action of chasing from the information in the slogan, the butterfly
nets and his or her own world knowledge.

The main action vectors are formed by the gazes of the two men toward the
woman who is looking away rather than retuning the gaze (see figure C9.2). At
first this seems to be a one-sided action, as the woman does not return the gaze.
However, the words help to give the impression that the woman actually is
aware of the men's gaze but is pretending not to be. Rather than returning their
gaze, she is playing hard to get, responding to the gaze by 'posing'.

The thing that makes this picture interesting and problematic is a second set of
vectors moving downward from each of the men's shoulders with their arms
moving towards one another. This gives the impression that they might be
holding hands, although their hands are obscured by foliage. And so the status of
the participants becomes ambiguous--the vector from their eyes moves towards
the woman. The vector from their arms moves towards each other. Aside from
the hint of a homosexual relationship, this ambiguity constructs these figures as
both cooperating to catch the woman and competing with each other.

Figure C9.2 Wacoal Bra advertisement (2)

Interpersonal Function

None of the participants in the picture looks at the viewer. The men look towards
the woman, and the woman looks up into space. This gives the viewer the feeling
of looking at a private scene. In other words, the viewer takes the position of a
voyeur. Positioning the reader like this reinforces the theme of the picture-- TM
'watching'. The men are secretly watching the woman. The woman is secretly
pretending not to know she is being watched. And the viewer is secretly

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watching the whole scene. Thus, although the viewer is not connected to the
characters through gaze, he or she is nevertheless made to feel somehow part of
the image by being placed into this voyeur-like position.

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 The woman is positioned in the foreground of the image, closer to the viewer,
and, although she is not looking at him or her, this creates and increased feeling
of intimacy and identification with this character. The intimacy is increased
because we can see her face and the men cannot, and also because she is
(presumably) 'speaking' to us through the printed text.

Although the forest vegetation and the men are shown in photographic accuracy,
the picture does not seem to present a 'true' or realistic world, but rather a
dream world. This impression is reinforced by the high color saturation and the
non-realistic elements (such as the woman's wings).

Textual Function

The woman is obviously the most important character in the story as she is
placed in the foreground of the picture with her whole body displayed while the
men are in the background with half of their bodies obscured. The woman is also
placed in the lower left quadrant of the picture, the quadrant of the given and
the real, while the men occupy the upper right quadrant of the picture, where
the new and the ideal usually appear. There are a number of possible reasons
for this. One is that the woman in the picture is intended to be portrayed as
passive, earth-like and 'natural', and the men as active, thinking, rational,
intellectual. Another reason might be that the woman (and her bra) are
presented as a cause and the men chasing her are presented as a result of this
cause. Still another possibly is that the intended viewer of the image (probably a
woman) is likely be more interested in the menand if she reads the picture in
the expected way, her eye moves across and upward to towards the men' in the
upper part of the picture. The irony is that while the image portrays men looking
at a woman, the composition of the image is such that the gaze of the viewer
moves away from the woman and towards the men.

Ideology

This picture is rich in imagery from both science and literature. The scene
reminds the viewer of fairly tales and myths containing forest nymphs. At the
same time, there is the clear hint of sexual pursuit, reinforced by the relative lack
of clothing of all participants. The innocence of the Discourse of fairly tales,
then, is juxtaposed with the 'adultness' of the sexual narrative. There is also the
Discourse of science present, with the woman being portrayed as a 'specimen'
for the men to catch, admire, examine and catalogue. The implication is that she
is just one of many specimens that may have been caught. The ad seems to be
communicating to young women that to be put in the position of the woman in
this ad is desirable: to be watched (secretly) by men, to be competed over, to be
chased are things to which she should aspire. At the same time, although tTM he
woman in the image is passive, there is still a sense that she is in some way in
control of the situation; she enjoys being chased, and catching her is likely to be

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difficult since she has the advantage of wings which her pursuers lack. Thus, the
product, the Butterfly Bra, like the butterfly wings, is constructed as making a
woman simultaneously more desirable but less likely to be caught.

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 Activity

Find an advertisement from a magazine, website, billboard or some other
medium which features one or more images and analyze it in the same way we
analyzed the example above, considering how the visual elements (as well as the
text) create ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning. Also consider how
these three kinds of meaning work together to promote a particular version of
reality or to create or reinforce a certain set of social relationships.

Fifteen seconds in a writing center

Now we will turn to how you might go about analyzing multimodality in face-to-
face interaction, using as an example just fifteen seconds of interaction in a
university writing center where students go to get advice about their written
assignments from peer tutors. The fact that we will only be looking at a very
small segment attests to the multimodal richness of most face-to-face interaction
-- quite a lot can occur in just fifteen seconds. At the same time, this kind of
microanalysis can also be risky if the analyst looses sight of the higher-level
actions that the segment under analysis is part of. Thus, in a thorough
multimodal analysis of interaction, the analysts always alternates his or her
attention from the small details to the big picture, always asking how micro-
elements like gaze and posture shifts, gesture and intonation contours help
participants to accomplish the higher-level actions they are engaged in.

This example also demonstrates one way of producing a multimodal
transcription. The segment of interaction to be analyzed is presented in 12
frames captured from a digital video of the tutoring session (see figure C9.4). The
frames were not captured at any regular time interval. Rather, a frame was
captured each time a new meaningful lower-level action such as a gaze shift, a
gesture, or a tone unit of speech was produced. As can be seen in the images, in
many of the frames multiple meaningful actions were performed across multiple
modes simultaneously. In the type of transcription demonstrated here (adapted
from Norris 2005), things like head movements, the trajectory of gestures and
the direction of gaze are marked with arrows, and the speech of participants is
represented in text of varying sizes above their heads, the size and direction of
the letters representing stress and intonation.

The analysis we will demonstrate here will focus on intermodal relationships,
how actions taken with different modes of communication work together and
affect one another. It will make use of two basic concepts: sequentiality -- the idea
that lower-level actions are arranged in meaningful sequences to form higher-
level actions -- and simultaneity the idea that when actions are produced TM at the
same time, they can affect how each other should be interpreted. Related to these
two concepts is the notion that all actions are mutually negotiated between
participants in interaction. The actions that one person performs are always in

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some ways influenced or constrained by the actions that the other person
performs.

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 As mentioned above, one aim of such an analysis is to identify the lower-level
actions and understand how they combine together to form higher-level actions.
The ultimate aim, however, is to use such an analysis to understand how people
use the many resources that are available to them to perform social practices and
enact social identities in ways that promote and reinforce particular Discourses
or social relationships.

a. (1 sec) b. (2 sec) c. (3 sec)

d. (5 sec) e. (6 sec) f. (7 sec)

g. (8 sec) h. (9 sec) i. (10 sec)

j. (13 sec) k. (14 sec) l. (15 sec)

Figure C9.3 An interaction in a writing center

The two participants in this segment are the tutor (the woman seated on the TM
right, and the client (the man seated on the left). The session begins with the
tutor saying, soummm, and making two small beat gestures with her pen
towards the clients essay lying on the table in time with the two syllables (frame

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a). Beat gestures are perhaps the most common kinds of gestures. We use them
to keep time in interactions, often tracking the rhythm of our speech, and they
are important in helping participants synchronize things like turn taking. They

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 can also function to signal that a new higher-level action or a new frame is being
taken up, much like discourse markers (see Section B6). In this case the two beats
along with the utterance signal that a new part of the tutoring session is about to
start.

In frames b though f the tutor asks, is there anything in particular you think you
want some more help with? This utterance is accompanied by a complex
combination of actions that contribute to constructing the meaning of the
utterance and the relationship between the participants. As she says the words,
anything particular, the tutor points to the clients essay and inscribes a circle in
the air with her pen. This is followed by a downward motion on the stressed
syllable TIC. Gestures like this, which involve pointing, are known as deictic
gestures. The tutor follows this deictic gesture towards the essay with another
one, pointing her pen towards the client when she says, YOU think. Right after
she utters the word think, the client leans slightly forward and raises his hand
to his chin, forming the iconic gesture5 of a person deep in thought. This is a good
an example of the way listeners use modes like gesture to contribute to
conversations even when they do not have access to the resource of speech.

As the tutor says, you want some more help with, she gazes at the client,
signaling that she is preparing to end her turn. Gaze is an important resource for
the managing of turn-taking in conversation, with speakers often looking away
when they are speaking and then turning their gaze back to their interlocutor
when they are finished. When the tutor finishes her question, she leans back
slightly and brushes the hair from her face, almost as if she is clearing
interactional space for the clients response as he issues a hesitant ummmmm.

As she is waiting for his response, the tutor tilts her head downward and directs
her gaze towards the essay, as if signaling that it is there that the client might
find the answer to her questions (frame i). This is also a kind of deictic gesture,
but she is using her head to point rather than her hand. The client answers this
downward motion with an upward motion of his arm to touch his glasses,
another iconic gesture signaling that he is searching for something he would
like help with. Then the client lowers his hand and asks, do you know the
meaning of this paragraph?, inscribing exactly the same kind of circle above his
essay that the tutor had just moments before (frame k).

The modes of gaze, head movement, posture, gesture, and prosody in this short
segment do not just help participants to frame their utterances and organize the
interaction. These modes also work together to construct the higher-level action
of having a tutorial and to construct the relationship between the two
participants as one of unequal power. The tutor demonstrates her power over
the client in a number of small ways: though gaze (she gazes at him much m TM ore
than he does at her), though her posture (she sits higher and straighter than he

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5 Iconic gestures can be distinguished from other kinds of gestures for conveying ideas such as
metaphoric gestures. Whereas iconic gestures represent concepts or actions in a way that forms a
rather direct physical imitation of them, metaphoric gestures represent concepts and actions in
more abstract, metaphorical ways.

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 does), and though gestures (she frequently points at him and at his essay with
her pen and her head). Furthermore, all of the clients gestures (the thinking
gesture, the searching gesture, and the imitation of the tutors deictic circle)
seem to be in response to the tutors words or gestures, as if she is controlling
him like a puppet. Another important mode the tutor uses to maintain control of
the interaction, which we have not mentioned, is object handling. Not only does
she hold a pen throughout the interaction (while the client is empty handed), but
she also keeps her left hand placed on the edge of the clients essay during this
entire segment as if she is prepared to take it away from him at any moment.

Activity

Videotape a short interaction and divide a segment of the video into frames using
an easy to use computer program like iMovie (Mac) or Windows Movie Maker.
Analyze how participants use the modes of gesture, gaze, posture, head
movement, and prosody along with the mode of spoken language to create
meaning and manage the interaction. Pay attention to how lower-level actions
are sequenced to form higher-level actions and how actions performed
simultaneously affect one anothers meaning.

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 C10 ANALYZING CORPORA

In order to illustrate the procedures for corpus assisted discourse analysis
explained in Section B10, in this section I will examine a corpus of song lyrics by
Lady Gaga, compare it to a more general corpus of pop music, and discuss how
things like concordances and frequency lists can be used to generate theories
about texts in a corpus. Working though these procedures with a specific corpus
will also give me a chance to discuss some of the practical aspects of creating and
working with corpora. I recommend that you download AntConc or some other
software program for corpus analysis before reading this chapter, and as you
read along try out some of the procedures with a corpus of your own, perhaps a
corpus of song lyrics from your own favorite singer.

My corpus consists of the lyrics of 59 songs released by Lady Gaga as of
November, 2010. Song lyrics are a good example of a type of text which might
have to be cleaned or otherwise altered before being suitable for inclusion in a
corpus. For example, such texts often include things like labels indicating chorus
or verse, which are not relevant to the analysis and should be removed.6
Sometimes repeated words or phrases are written in a kind of shorthand (e.g. I
love you x 3). These need to be written out fully so that the texts reflect exactly
what is sung. For my corpus, song titles and labels like chorus and verse were
deleted. Each song was saved in a separate text file and loaded into AntConc.

For my reference corpus I decided to choose a more general sampling of pop
music from the same period. Thus, I compiled a corpus of the Billboard top 100
pop songs from November 2010. What this means, of course, is that my reference
corpus is almost twice the size of my primary corpus. This is, in fact, normal,
since a reference corpus generally contains a broader sampling of texts. These
texts were prepared in the same manner as the texts for the Lady Gaga corpus.

Table C10.1 Size of corpora and type token ratio

No. of Texts No. of Tokens No. of Types Type Token
Ratio
Lady Gaga 59 11.44 19601 1713
Songs
Top 100 Hits 100 33412 3680 9.07
(11/11)

Table C10.1 shows the number of texts as well as the number of tokens and types
in each corpus. It also shows the type token ratio for each corpus. Note that TMthe
type token ration for both of these corpora is rather low compared to the BNC
written (45.53) and spoken (32.96) corpora. This is not surprising. Pop music

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6 A more advanced practitioner, especially one interested in genre analysis, might remove these
labels but also tag the different parts of songs using XML language so that analysis could be done
just on the choruses or just on the verses of songs.

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 generally involves quite a lot of repetition and a fairly narrow range of topics. As
can be seen from the chart, the type token ratio for the Lady Gaga corpus is
slightly higher than the reference corpus, suggesting that Lady Gagas lyrics
might exhibit more lexical complexity than other pop music produced around the
same time.

Table C10.2 Top five function words

100 Top Songs Lady Gaga Songs
Word Rank Freq. % of Word Rank Freq. % of
Tokens Tokens
I 1 1709 5.11 I 1 866 4.41
you 2 1167 3.49 you 2 718 3.66
the 3 870 2.6 the 3 463 2.36
and 4 687 2.05 oh 4 433 2.2
it 5 629 1.88 me 5 398 2.03

Table C10.2 shows the frequency of the most frequently occurring function words
in the two corpora along with their overall ranking, their numerical frequency
and the percentage of the total tokens they represent. Note that the percentage
of total tokens is important when you are comparing corpora of different sizes.
Some programs will calculate this for you, but with AntConc users must do this
themselves.

The fact that the most frequent words in both of these corpora are I and you is
consistent with other corpus based studies of popular music. Murphey (1992)
found a similar degree of frequency for these pronouns in a corpus of English
pop songs from the late 80s. This, of course, makes sense given that pop songs
usually involve a singer (or singer persona) singing to another person, usually a
lover.

What is interesting in our findings is the relative frequency of the accusative
form me in the Lady Gaga corpus. In fact, the pronoun me occurs almost twice
as frequently in the Lady Gaga corpus (2.03% of the total tokens) than it does in
the reference corpus (1.3% of the total tokens). This suggests that the singer
persona in Lady Gagas songs portrays herself more frequently in the object
position, the position of having things done to or for her, than singers in other
songs.

Table C10.3 Top five content words

100 Top Songs Lady Gaga Songs
Word Rank Freq. % of Word Rank Freq. % of
TM
Tokens Tokens
like 23 234 .70 love 17 193 .98

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baby 34 166 .49 baby 21 158 .80
know 36 155 .46 want 29 109 .56
love 39 143 .43 know 36 91 .46
gonna 42 127 .38 no 37 91 .46

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Table C10.3 shows the five most frequent content words in the two corpora. As
you can see, content words occur much less frequently than function words.
Again, the words listed are words normally associated with pop music like love
and baby. One interesting finding is the grater frequency of the word love in
the corpus of Lady Gaga lyrics compared to the reference corpora. This might
lead one to think that love is a greater preoccupation of Lady Gaga than it is of
other popular singers. But the truth, of course, is more complicated than that
and, as we will see below, has much to do with the way the notion of love is
discursively constructed in Lady Gagas music.

Word frequency lists can often suggest suitable candidates for concordance
searches and collocation analysis. In this case, I have decided to do a
concordance of the word me, due to its relative frequency in the Lady Gaga
corpus as compared to the reference corpus. Figures C10.1 and C10.2 show
sections of that search, which revealed a number of different kinds of words
congregating around the word me. One of the most common, of course, was
love. Another common collocate was look or looked, with the singer persona
frequently talking about being looked at or not being looked at. Other common
phrases included touch me, kiss me, feel me, and tell me.

This initial analysis suggests some very interesting differences between the
construction of love in the Lady Gaga corpus and that in the reference corpus: In
the Lady Gaga corpus love and its associated processes of looking, touching and
kissing are often portrayed as directed toward the singer. That is, the singer is
portrayed primarily as the object of other peoples love.

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Figure C10.1 Partial concordance list for me

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Figure C10.2 Partial concordance list for me

A collocation analysis of the word love also reveals differences between the
Lady Gaga corpus and the reference corpus. Table C10.4 shows the five top
collocates of the word love in a span ranging from five words to the left of love
and five words to the right

Table C10.4 Top 5 collocates of love (span 5L, 5R)

Lady Gaga Corpus 100 Song Corpus
I I
you you
want my
your the
me me

While I and you collocate frequently with the word love in both corpora, the
words want and your appear as the third and forth most frequent collocates in
the Lady Gaga corpus as opposed to my and the, which take these places in the
reference corpus, again suggesting a greater preoccupation on the part of the
singer in the Lady Gaga corpus than in the reference corpus with receiving love
from the listener.

One final procedure I would like to demonstrate is the keyword list, which, as you
will recall from Section B10 is generated by calculating the statistical probability
of words occurring in a corpus with reference to a larger, more general corpus.
Keywords, in other words, are words that are in some ways special, in that
TM they
occur with a greater frequency than they would in normal circumstances.

Figure C10.3 shows the 22 words with the highest measure of keyness in the

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Lady Gage corpus. Some of these words appear simply because they are unique
to this collection of songs and are unlikely to occur in other songs words like

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 Alejandro (a mans name and the title of one of Lady Gagas songs), and fu
which occurs in the lyrics: I want your fu-fu-fu-fu future love.

Other words, however, while they might be common in pop songs, are words
that point to topics that are particularly salient in the music of Lady Gaga, words
like disco, fame and romance. One particularly interesting finding is the high
keyness of negative words like dirty and bad. It is also interesting that the two
words with the highest degree of keyness in the corpus are the sound words
oh and eh, reflecting the frequently occurring streams of nonsense syllables
that characterize Lady Gagas lyrics.

Figure C10.3 Keywords in the Lady Gaga corpus


Find additional examples online

Activity

a. Use the analysis described above as the starting point for a closer examination
of Lady Gagas song lyrics (available at http://www.ladygaga.com), using some of
the principles of text analysis discussed in section B4. You might, for example,
focus on things like transitivity, modality, and intertextuality). Does your close TM
reading of the text confirm and build upon any of the findings of the corpus
analysis?
b. Compile your own corpus of pop songs from another singer and conduct a

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similar analysis, comparing this singers discourse with that of Lady Gaga.

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SECTION D:

EXTENSION: READINGS IN
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

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 D1 THE THREE PERSPECTIVES REVISITED

In this Section you will read three excerpts from important figures in the field of
discourse analysis, each illustrating one of the three perspectives on discourse
that we discussed in Section B1. The first is from the famous 1952 essay by the
linguist Zellig Harris in which he coined the term discourse analysis. In it he
outlines the limitations of traditional approaches to language and explains why
we need a method to examine language beyond the level of the clause.

The second is an excerpt from the PhD. dissertation of H. G. Widdowson in which
he questions some of the assumptions made by Harris and argues that the
analysis of discourse must go beyond just looking at how texts are put together
to exploring how people use language to perform social actions. In making this
argument he acknowledges his debt to the American sociolinguist William Labov,
who advanced the idea that the object of linguistics must ultimately be the
instrument of communication used by the speech community, and if we are not
talking about that language there is something trivial in our proceedings
(1972:187).

The last excerpt comes from the American discourse analyst and educationalist
James Paul Gee. In this excerpt he defines discourse in an even broader way as
the way we build social identities and social activities by combining language
with other stuff.

As you read these three excerpts, try to consider how these different scholars are
responding to or building upon what the others have said. Think about how their
respective approaches to discourse differ from one another and also ways in
which they might be reconciled.

A.
Discourse analysis
Zellig Harris (reprinted from Language 28(1) (1952): 1-30)

The problem

One can approach discourse analysis from two types of problem, which turn out
to be related. The first is the problem of continuing descriptive linguistics
beyond the limits of a single sentence at a time. The other is the question oTMf
correlating culture and language (i.e. non-linguistic and linguistic behavior).
The first problem arises because descriptive linguistics generally stops at

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sentence boundaries. This is not due to any prior decision. The techniques of
linguistics were constructed to study any stretch of speech, of whatever length.
But in every language it turns out that almost all the results lie within a relatively
short stretch, which we may call a sentence. That is, when we can state a

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 restriction on the occurrence of element A in respect to the occurrence of
element B, it will almost always be the case that A and B are regarded as
occurring within the same sentence. Of English adjectives, for instance, we can
say that they occur before a noun or after certain verbs (in the same sentence):
the dark clouds, the future seems bright; only rarely can we state restrictions
across sentence boundaries, e.g. that if the main verb of one sentence has a given
tense-suffix, the main verb of the next sentence will have a particular other
tense-suffix. We cannot say that if one sentence has the form NV, the next
sentence will have the form N. We can only say that most sentences are NV, some
are N, and so on; and that these structures occur in various sequences.

In this way descriptive linguistics, which sets out to describe the occurrence of
elements in any stretch of speech, ends up by describing it primarily in respect to
other elements of the same sentence. This limitation has not seemed too serious,
because it has not precluded the writing of adequate grammars: the grammar
states the sentence structure; the speaker makes up a particular sentence in
keeping with this structure, and supplies the particular sequence of sentences.
The other problem, that of the connection between behavior (or social situation)
and language, has always been considered beyond the scope of linguistics
proper. Descriptive linguistics has not dealt with the meanings of morphemes;
and though one might try to get around that by speaking not of meanings, but of
the social and interpersonal situation in which speech occurs, descriptive
linguistics has had no equipment for taking the social situation into account: it
has only been able to state the occurrence of one linguistic element in respect to
the occurrence of others. Culture-and-language studies have therefore been
carried on without benefit of the recent distributional investigations of
linguistics. For example, they list the meanings expressed in the language by
surveying the vocabulary stock; or they draw conclusions from the fact that in a
particular language a particular set of meanings is expressed by the same
morpheme; or they discuss the nuances of meaning and usage of one word in
comparison with others (e.g. in stylistics). Culture-and-language studies have
also noted such points as that phrases are to be taken in their total meaning
rather than as the sum of the meanings of their component morphemes, e.g. that
How are you? is a greeting rather than a question about health-an example that
illustrates the correlation of speech with social situation. Similarly, personality
characteristics in speech have been studied by correlating an individual's
recurrent speech features with recurrent features of his behavior and feeling.

Distribution within discourse

Distributional or combinatorial analysis within one discourse at a time turns out
to be relevant to both of these problems. On the one hand, it carries us past
TM the
sentence limitation of descriptive linguistics. Although we cannot state the
distribution of sentences (or, in general, any inter-sentence relation) when we
are given an arbitrary conglomeration of sentences in a language, we can get

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quite definite results about certain relations across sentence boundaries when
we consider just the sentences of a particular connected discourse-that is, the
sentences spoken or written in succession by one or more persons in a single

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 situation. This restriction to connected discourse does not detract from the
usefulness of the analysis, since all language occurrences are internally
connected. Language does not occur in stray words or sentences, but in
connected discourse-from a one-word utterance to a ten volume work, from a
monolog to a Union Square argument. Arbitrary conglomerations of sentences
are indeed of no interest except as a check on grammatical description; and it is
not surprising that we cannot find interdependence among the sentences of such
an aggregate. The successive sentences of a connected discourse, however, offer
fertile soil for the methods of descriptive linguistics, since these methods study
the relative distribution of elements within a connected stretch of speech.

On the other hand, distributional analysis within one discourse at a time yields
information about certain correlations of language with other behavior. The
reason is that each connected discourse occurs within a particular situation,
whether of a person speaking, or of a conversation, or of someone sitting down
occasionally over a period of months to write a particular kind of book in a
particular literary or scientific tradition. To be sure, this concurrence between
situation and discourse does not mean that discourses occurring in similar
situations must necessarily have certain formal characteristics in common, while
discourses occurring in different situations must have certain formal differences.
The concurrence between situation and discourse only makes it understandable,
or possible, that such formal correlations should exist. It remains to be shown as
a matter of empirical fact that such formal correlations do indeed exist, that the
discourses of a particular person, social group, style, or subject-matter exhibit
not only particular meanings (in their selection of morphemes) but also
characteristic formal features. The particular selection of morphemes cannot be
considered here. But the formal features of the discourses can be studied by
distributional methods within the text; and the fact of their correlation with a
particular type of situation gives a meaning-status to the occurrence of these
formal features.

The nature of the method

We have raised two problems: that of the distributional relations among
sentences, and that of the correlation between language and social situation. We
have proposed that information relevant to both of these problems can be
obtained by a formal analysis of one stretch of discourse at a time. What KIND of
analysis would be applicable here? To decide this, we consider what is permitted
by the material.

Since the material is simply a string of linguistic forms arranged in successive
sentences, any formal analysis is limited to locating linguistic elements within TM
these sentences-that is, to stating the occurrence of elements. We cannot set up
any method for investigating the nature or composition of these elements, or
their correlations with non-linguistic features, unless we bring in new

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information from outside.

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 Furthermore, there are no particular elements, say but or I or communism,
which have a prior importance, such as would cause us to be interested in the
mere fact of their presence or absence in our text. Any analysis which aimed to
find out whether certain particular words, selected by the investigator, occur in
the text or not, would be an investigation of the CONTENT of the text and would
be ultimately based on the MEANINGS of the words selected. If we do not depend
upon meaning in our investigation, then the only morphemes or classes which
we can deal with separately are those which have grammatically stated
peculiarities of distribution.

Since, then, we are not in general interested in any particular element selected in
advance, our interest in those elements that do occur cannot be merely in the
tautologic statement THAT they occur, but in the empirical statement of HOW
they occur: which ones occur next to which others, or in the same environment
as which others, and so on-that is, in the relative occurrence of these elements
with respect to each other. In this sense, our method is comparable to that which
is used, in the case of a whole language, in compiling a grammar (which states
the distributional relations among elements), rather than in compiling a
dictionary (which lists all the elements that are found in the language, no matter
where).

Finally, since our material is a closed string of sentences, our statement about the
distribution of each element can only be valid within the limits of this succession
of sentences, whether it be a paragraph or a book. We will see, we can sometimes
use information about the distribution of an element outside our material; but
this can be only an external aid, brought in after the distribution of the element
within the discourse has been completely stated.

Issues to consider

For Harris, one of the aims of discourse analysis is to describe texts in
the same way linguists describe sentences, by explaining the
occurrences of elements in relation to the occurrence of other
elements. What might be the advantages of trying to discover the
rules that govern the ways texts are put together in the same way we
can talk about the rules that govern the way sentences are put
together? What could such knowledge be used for? Do you think the
logic that governs the way we look at sentence level grammar can be
extended to longer stretches of text or conversation?

Harris suggests that by studying the formal distribution of elements in
texts used in different social situations we will be able to discover
TM
correlations between certain kinds of structures and certain kinds of
social behavior. Can you think of some examples of text structures that
nearly always occur in connections with certain kinds of social

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practices? What are some of the limitations of this approach?

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B.
An applied linguistic approach to discourse analysis
Henry G. Widdowson (reprinted from his unpublished doctoral dissertation 1973)

(Harriss) aim is simply to establish formal patterns without reference to
meaning. But Harris nevertheless believes that his analysis has some bearing on
how discourse is understood as communication. At first sight it would appear
that his aim is to contribute to studies of contextualized language in both of the
senses distinguished at the beginning of this chapter. In a prolegomenon to his
actual analysis he makes the comment:

One can approach discourse analysis from two types of problem, which
turn out to be related. The first is the problem of continuing descriptive
linguistics beyond the limits of a single sentence at a time. The other is the
question of correlating culture and language (i.e. nonlinguistic and
linguistic behavior). (Harris 1952/1964: 356)

It turns out, however, that what Harris has in mind in the second of these
problems is something very like the Hallidaian notion of register. He appears to
believe that the kind of distributional analysis of morpheme sequences that he
proposes will provide a basis for correlating the formal properties of different
pieces of language with the social situations in which they occur.

*

Since Harris has taken a considerable number of steps in the description of
discourse, the question naturally arises as to how he has managed to do this
without considering speech events and social contexts at all, even though, as we
have seen, he acknowledges that his description should bear upon the problem
of how language is understood in social situations.

The answer to this question is, of course, that whereas Harris conceives of
discourse as contextualized language data in one of the senses we have
distinguished, Labov thinks of it as contextualized language data in the other
sense. Harris looks for patterns of linguistic elements which link sentences
together into a larger formal structure, and Labov looks at the way linguistic
elements are used to perform communicative acts, and this kind of enquiry takes
him outside the actual linguistic properties of the text not, as with Harris, to the
linguistic properties of the code but to the extra-linguistic factors of the social
TM
situation. Labovs emphasis, therefore, is on the performance of social actions
rather than on the incidence of linguistic forms

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*

It seems clear, then, that we are confronted here with two quite different kinds of
enquiry both contending for the same name. A terminological distinction seems

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 to be called for. The kind of investigation carried out by Harris into the formal
structure of a piece of language might be called text analysis. Its purpose is to
discover the patterning of linguistic elements beyond the limit of the sentence,
and what it is that provides a text with its cohesion. Thus what Harris calls
discourse analysis will be referred to as text analysis. One is to some degree
justified in thus taking liberties with Harriss terminology by the fact that Harris
himself appears to use the terms text and discourse interchangeably, as for
example, in the following quotation:

The formal features of the discourses can be studied by distributional
methods within the text. (Harris 1952/1964: 357)

We may now use the term discourse analysis to refer to the kind of investigation
proposed by Labov into the way linguistic elements are put to communicative
use in the performing of social actions. Its purpose is to discover what sentences
count as utterances and what it is that provides a discourse with its coherence as
a piece of communication.

Issues to consider

Widdowson contrasts Harriss view of discourse, which focuses on
linguistic patterns and tries to correlate them to different social
situations with that of Labov, who focuses on how language is used to
perform particular communicative acts. What arguments could be
made for and against these two contrasting views? Is there any way
they could be fruitfully combined or are they mutually exclusive?

Widdowson associates the perspective of Harris (discourse as
language beyond the clause) more with the study of cohesion and the
perspective of Labov (discourse as language in use) more with the
study of the coherence of discourse as a piece of communication. How
can you explain this distinction based on the discussion of cohesion
and coherence in section B2?

C.
Discourses
James Paul Gee (reprinted from Introduction to discourse analysis (2010): 28-29)

People build identities and activities not just through language, but by using TM
language together with other stuff that isnt language. If you want to get
recognized as a street-gang member of a certain sort you have to speak in the

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right way, but you also have to act and dress in the right way, as well. You
also have to engage (or, at least, behave as if you are engaging) in characteristic
ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, and believing. You also
have to use or be able to use various sorts of symbols (e.g., graffiti), tools (e.g., a

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 weapon), and objects (e.g., street corners) in the right places and at the right
times. You cant just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk as well.
The same is true of doing/being a corporate lawyer, Marine sergeant, radical
feminist, or a regular at the local bar. One and the same person might talk, act,
and interact in such a way as to get recognized as a street gang member in one
context and, in another context, talk, act, and interact in quite different ways so
as to get recognized as a gifted student. And, indeed, these two identities, and
their concomitant ways of talking, acting, and interacting, may well conflict with
each other in some circumstances (where different people expect different
identities from the person), as well as in the persons own mind.

I use the term Discourse, with a capital D, for ways of combining and
integrating language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking, believing, valuing,
and using various symbols, tools, and objects to enact a particular sort of socially
recognizable identity. Thinking about the different Discourses a piece of
language is part of is another tool for engaging in discourse analysis.

*

A Discourse is a characteristic way of saying, doing, and being. When you speak
or write anything, you use the resources of English to project yourself as a
certain kind of person, a different kind in different circumstances. You also
project yourself as engaged in a certain practice or activity. If I have no idea who
you are and what you are doing, then I cannot make sense of what you have said,
written, or done.

You project a different identity at a formal dinner party than you do at the family
dinner table. And, though these are both dinner, they are nonetheless different
practices or activities (different games). The fact that people have differential
access to different identities and practices, connected to different sorts of status
and social goods, is a root source of inequality in society. Intervening in such
matters can be a contribution to social justice. Since different identities and
activities are enacted in and through language, the study of language is integrally
connected to matters of equity and justice.

Issues to consider

Discourses are larger systems for making meaning and enacting
social identities in which language plays a part, along with other things
like dress, behavior, attitude, etc. You can list the languages that you
speak (such a English, Japanese and Korean). Can you list some
Discourses that you speak? TM

Gee says that sometimes the way we talk, act, and interact in order to
do/be one kind of person might conflict with the way we talk, act,

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and interact in order to do/be another kind of person, and that
sometimes this causes problems in regard to things like social equity
and justice. Can you think of any examples of this?

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 D2 TWO PERSPECTIVES ON TEXTURE

In this Section we have included excerpts from two classic texts which address
the problem of texture. The first is from Cohesion in English by M.A.K. Halliday
and Ruqauya Hasan. In this excerpt the authors explain their basic idea of
cohesion and the different kinds of devices that create cohesion in texts. The
second is from the article Notes on a Schema for Stories by David Rumelhardt in
which the author argues that our ability to understand stories depends on us
having in our minds the basic structure or schema for stories.

A.
The concept of cohesion
Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (reprinted from Cohesion in English, 1976,
London: Longman, pp. 1-9)

1.1.1 Text

If a speaker of English hears or reads a passage of the language which is more
than one sentence in length, he can normally decide without difficulty whether it
forms a unified whole or is just a collection of unrelated sentences. This book is
about what makes the difference between the two.

The word TEXT is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written,
of whatever length, that docs form a unified whole. We know, as a general rule,
whether any specimen of our own language constitutes a TEXT or not. This does
not mean there can never be any uncertainty. The distinction between a text and
a collection of unrelated sentences is in the last resort a matter of degree, and
there may always be instances about which we are uncertain - a point that is
probably familiar to most teachers from reading their students' compositions.
But this does not invalidate the general observation that we are sensitive to the
distinction between what is text and what is not.

This suggests that there are objective factors involved - there must be certain
features which are characteristic of texts and not found otherwise; and so there
are. We shall attempt to identify these, in order to establish what are the
properties of texts in English, and what it is that distinguishes a text from a
disconnected sequence of sentences. As always in linguistic description, we shall
be discussing things that the native speaker of the language' knows' already - but
without knowing that he knows them.

A text may be spoken or written, prose or verse, dialogue or monologue. It TM may
be anything from a single proverb to a whole play, from a momentary cry for
help to an all-day discussion on a committee. A text is a unit of language in use. It

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is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence; and it is not defined by its
size. A text is sometimes envisaged to be some kind of super-sentence, a
grammatical unit that is larger than a sentence but is related to a sentence in the
same way that a sentence is related to a clause, a clause to a group and so on: by

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 CONSTITUENCY, the composition of larger units out of smaller ones. But this is
misleading. A text is not something that is like a sentence, only bigger; it is
something that differs from a sentence in kind.

A text is best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit: a unit not of form but of meaning.
Thus it is related to a clause or sentence not by size but by REALIZATION, the
coding of one symbolic system in another. A text does not CONSIST OF sentences;
it is REALIZED BY, or encoded in, sentences. If we understand it in this way, we
shall not expect to find the same kind of STRUCTURAL integration among the
parts of a text as we find among the parts of a sentence or clause. The unity of a
text is a unity of a different kind.

1.1.2 Texture

The concept of TEXTURE is entirely appropriate to express the property of 'being
a text'. A text has texture, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is
not a text. It derives this texture from the fact that it functions as a unity with
respect to its environment.

What we are investigating in this book are the resources that English has for
creating texture. If a passage of English containing more than one sentence is
perceived as a text, there will be certain linguistic features present in that
passage which can be identified as contributing to its total unity and giving it
texture.

Let us start with a simple and trivial example. Suppose we find the following
instructions in the cookery book:

[1:1] Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.

It is clear that them in the second sentence refers back to (is ANAPH0RIC to) the
six cooking apples in the first sentence. This ANAPHORIC function of them gives
cohesion to the two sentences, so that we interpret them as a whole; the two
sentences together constitute a text. Or rather, they form part of the same text;
there may be more of it to follow.

The texture is provided by the cohesive RELATION that exists between them and
six cooking apples. It is important to make this point, because we shall be
constantly focusing attention on the items, such as them, which typically refer
back to something that has gone before; but the cohesion is effected not by the
presence of the referring item alone but by the presence of both the referring
item and the item that it refers to. In other words, it is not enough that there
should be a presupposition; the presupposition must also be satisfied. This TM
accounts for the humorous effect produced by the radio comedian who began his
act with the sentence

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[1:2] So we pushed him under the other one.

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 This sentence is loaded with presuppositions, located in the words so, him, other
and one, and, since it was the opening sentence, none of them could be resolved.
What is the MEANING of the cohesive relation between them and six cooking
apples? The meaning is that they refer to' the same thing. The two items are
identical in reference, or COREFERENTIAL. The cohesive agency in this instance,
that which provides the texture, is the coreferentiality of them and six cooking
apples. The signal, or the expression, of this coreferentiality is the presence of the
potentially anaphoric item them in the second sentence together with a potential
target item six cooking apples in the first.

Identity of reference is not the only meaning relation that contributes to texture;
there are others besides. Nor is the use of a pronoun the only way of expressing
identity of reference. We could have had:

[1:3] Wash and core six cooking apples. Put the apples into a fireproof dish.
Here the item functioning cohesively is the apples, which works by repetition of
the word apples accompanied by the as an anaphoric signal. One of the functions
of the definite article is to signal identity of reference with something that has
gone before. (Since this has sometimes been said to be its only function, we
should perhaps point out that it has others as well, which are not cohesive at all;
for example none of the instances in (a) or (b) has an anaphoric sense:

[1:4] a. None but the brave deserve the fair.
b. The pain in my head cannot stifle the pain in my heart.

1.1.3 Ties

We need a term to refer to a single instance of cohesion, a term for one
occurrence of a pair of cohesively related items. This we shall call a TIE. The
relation between them and six cooking apples in example [1:1] constitutes a tie.

We can characterize any segment of a text' in terms of the number and kinds of
ties which it displays. In [1:1] there is just one tie, of the particular kind which
we shall be calling REFERENCE. In [1:3], there are actually two ties, of which one
is of the reference kind, and consists in the anaphoric relation of the to six
cooking apples, while the other is of a different kind and consists in the
REPETITION of the word apples, a repetition which would still have a cohesive
effect even if the two were not referring to the same apples.

The concept of a tie makes it possible to analyse a text in terms of its cohesive
properties, and give a systematic account of its patterns of texture. Various types
of question can be investigated in this way, for example concerning the
difference between speech and writing, the relationship between cohesion TM and
the organization of written texts into sentences and paragraphs, and the possible
differences among different genres and different authors in the numbers and

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kinds of tie they typically employ.

The different kinds of cohesive tie are: reference, substitution, ellipsis,
conjunction, and lexical cohesion.

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1.1.4 Cohesion

The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that
exist within the text, and that define it as a text.

Cohesion occurs where the INTERPRETATION of some element in the discourse
is dependent on that of another. The one PRESUPPOSES the other, in the sense
that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens,
a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing and the
presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text.

This is another way of approaching the notion of a tie. To return to example
[1:1], the word them presupposes for its interpretation something other than
itself. This requirement is met by the six cooking apples in the preceding
sentence. The presupposition, and the fact that it is resolved, provide cohesion
between the two sentences, and in so doing create text.
As another example, consider the old piece of schoolboy humour:

[1:5] Time flies.
-You can't; they fly too quickly.

The first sentence gives no indication of not being a complete text; in fact it
usually is, and the humour lies in the misinterpretation that is required if the
presupposition from the second sentence is to be satisfied. Here, incidentally the
cohesion is expressed in no less than three ties: the elliptical form you cant, the
reference item they and the lexical repetition fly.

Cohesion is part of the system of a language. The potential for cohesion lies in the
systematic resources of reference, ellipsis and so on that are built into the
language itself. The actualization of cohesion in any given instance, however,
depends not merely on the selection of some option from within these resources,
but also on the presence of some other element which resolves the
presupposition that this sets up. It is obvious that the selection of the word
apples has no cohesive force by itself; a cohesive relation is set up only if the
same word, or a word related to it such fruit, has occurred previously. It is less
obvious, but equally true, that the word them has no cohesive force either unless
there is some explicit referent for it within reach. In both instances, the cohesion
lies in the relation that is set up between the two.

Like other semantic relations, cohesion is expressed through the stratal
organization of language. Language can be explained as a multiple coding system
comprising three levels of coding, or 'strata': the semantic (meanings), the TM
lexicogrammatical (forms) and the phonological and orthographic (expressions).

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Meanings are realized (coded) as forms, and forms are realized in turn (recoded)
as expressions. To put this in everyday terminology, meaning is put into
wording, and wording into sound or writing:

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 meaning (the semantic system)

wording (the lexicogrammatical system, grammar

and vocabulary)

sounding'/writing (the phonological and orthographic
systems)

The popular term wording refers to lexicogrammatical form, the choice of
words and grammatical structures. Within this stratum, there is no hard-and-fast
division between vocabulary and grammar; the guiding principle in language is
that the more general meanings are expressed through the grammar, and the
more specific meanings through the vocabulary.

Cohesive relations fit into the same overall pattern. Cohesion is expressed partly
through the grammar and partly through the vocabulary. We can refer therefore
to GRAMMATICAL COHESION and LEXICAL COHESION. In example [1:3J, one of
the ties was grammatical (reference, expressed by the), the other lexical
(repetition, expressed by apples). The distinction between grammatical and
lexical is really only one of degree, and we need not make too much of it here. It
is important to stress, however, that when we talk of cohesion as being
grammatical or lexical, we do not imply that it is a purely formal relation, in
which meaning is not involved. Cohesion is a semantic relation. But, like all
components of the semantic system, it is realized through the lexicogrammatical
system; and it is at this point that the distinction can be drawn. Some forms of
cohesion are realized through the grammar and others through the vocabulary.

Issues to consider

Halliday and Hasan emphasize a number of times in this excerpt that
cohesion is a semantic concept rather than just a formal property of
texts. What do they mean by this and what does it reveal about their
perspective on discourse?

Halliday and Hasan say that A text does not CONSIST OF sentences; it
is REALIZED BY, or encoded in, sentences. What exactly is meant by
this distinction How can it be related to the contrasting views of Harris
and Widdowson (and Labov) that we saw in the last section?

B. TM

Story schema

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163
 David Rumelhart (reprinted from Notes on a schema for stories, 1975. In D.
Bobrow and A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in
Cognitive Science. New York: Academic Press, pp. 211-216)

Just as simple sentences can be said to have an internal structure, so too can
stories be said to have an internal structure. This is so in spite of the fact that no
one has ever been able to specify a general structure for stories that will
distinguish the strings of sentences which form stories from strings which do
not. Nevertheless, the notion of "well-formedness" is nearly as reasonable for
stories as it is for sentences. Consider the following examples:

(1) Margie was holding tightly to the string of her beautiful new balloon.
Suddenly, a gust of wind caught it. The wind carried it into a tree .. The balloon
hit a branch and burst. Margie cried and cried.

(2) Margie cried and cried. The balloon hit a branch and burst. The wind carried
it into a tree. Suddenly a gust of wind caught it. Margie was holding tightly to the
string of her beautiful new balloon.

Here we find two strings of sentences. One, however, also seems to form a
sensible whole, whereas the other seems to be analyzable into little more than a
string of sentences. These examples should make clear that some higher level of
organization takes place in stories that does not take place in strings of
sentences. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate that point, to develop some
notions of the sorts of structures that might be involved, and to illustrate, how
these structures can be used to produce cogent summaries of stories.

To begin, it is clear that simple sentences are not the highest level of structured
linguistic input. Sentences themselves can serve as arguments for higher
predicates and thus form more complex sentences. For example,

(3) Margie knew that her balloon had burst.

Here we have one sentence about the bursting of Margie's balloon embedded as
the argument of a higher verb. Sentences such as these, of course, occur with
high frequency. Another case in which sentences occur as arguments of higher
predicates is

(4) Margie cried and cried because her balloon broke.
In this case the predicate "because" takes two sentences as arguments. Now
consider the following pair of sentences:

(5a) Margie's balloon broke. TM
(5b) Margie cried and cried.

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It seems clear that the sentence pair (5a) and (5b) have almost the same
meaning as (4) and ought therefore to have the same underlying structure. Thus
if we are to understand correctly (5a) and (5b) we must infer the causal
relationship between the propositions. This, I suspect, is but a scratch on' the

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 surface of the kinds of "suprasentential" relationships that are implied and
understood in ordinary discourse. In particular, I suggest that the structure . of
stories is ordinarily more than pairwise relationships among sentences. Rather,
strings of sentences combine into psychological wholes. In the following section I
explore the nature of these wholes and propose a simple story grammar whIch
accounts for many of the salient facts about the structure of simple stories and
which will serve as the basis for a theory of summarization.

II. A SIMPLE STORY GRAMMAR

A. The Grammar Rules

In this section I will develop a grammar which I suggest accounts in a reasonable
way for the structure of a wide range of simple stories. 'The grammar consists of
a set of syntactical rules which generate the constituent structure of stories and a
corresponding set of semantic interpretation rules which determine the
semantic representation of the story. The symbol "+" is used to form two items in
a sequence; the symbol "|" is used to separate mutually exclusive alternatives. A
* following a structure name indicates one or more of those units; for' example,
A * is one or more As.

Rule 1: Story -> Setting + Episode

The first rule of our grammar says simply that stories consist of a Setting
followed by an Episode. The Setting is a statement of the time, and place of a
story as well as an introduction to its main characters. The Setting corresponds
to the initial section of stories such as:

Once upon a time, in a far away land there lived a good king, his beautiful queen,
and their daughter Princess Cordelia

The setting is usually just a series of stative propositions, often terminated by
phrases such as:

One day, as Princess Cordelia was walking near the palace.
In the story illustrated in the first example--the Margie story--the setting
consisted of the sentence:

Margie was holding the string of her beautiful new balloon.
The remainder of the story is an Episode. The simple semantic rule
corresponding to Rule 1 is:

Rule 1: ALLOW (Setting, Episode) TM

Semantically, the setting forms a structure into which the remainder of the story

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can be linked. It plays no integral part in the body of the story and under certain
conditions can be eliminated without adversely effecting (sic) the story: In such
cases, the characters and their relevant characteristics must be introduced in the
body of the story.

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Rule 2: Setting - > (State)*

Rule 2 simply expresses the assumption that settings consist of a set of stative
propositions.

Rule 2': AND (State, State, ... )

Semantically, the states are represented as a set of conjoined propositions
entered into the data base. .

The first real substantive rule m our rewrite for Episode is:

Rule 3: Episode -> Event + Reaction

Episodes are special kinds of events which involve the reactions of animate (or
anthropomorphized) objects to events in the world. The episode consists merely
of the occurrence of some event followed by the reaction of the hero of the
episode to the event. Our semantic rule corresponding to Rule 3 is:

Rule 3': INITIATE (Event, Reaction)

That is, the relationship between the external event and the hero's reaction is
one that I call INITIATE. I have taken the term from Schank (1973), although my
use is slightly different from his. I use the term INITIATE to represent a kind of
causal relationship between an external event and the willful reaction of a
thinking being to that event. In the Margie story illustrated in (1), I assume that
the relationship between Margie's crying and the breaking of her balloon is the
INITIATE relationship. Presumably, the crying is mediated by an internal mental
response such as "sadness".

Event is the most general category of our entire grammar. The following rule
expresses the structure of an event:

Rule 4: Event -> {Episode | Change-of- state | Action| Event + Event}

Thus an Event can be any of the alternatives, an episode, a simple change of state,
or an action that people carry out. All are special kinds of events. Furthermore, a
sequence of events also can constitute an event. The first three parts of Rule 4
require no semantic interpretation rules. Our semantic rule corresponding to the
fourth rewrite for event is:

Rule 4': CAUSE (Event, Event) or ALLOW (Event, Event) TM

The rule states that a sequence of two events can either be interpreted as one

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event CAUSE a second event or they can be interpreted as the first event ALLOW
the second. The term CAUSE is used when the relationship between the events is
one of physical causation as in the balloon hitting the branch causing the balloon
to break in the Margie story. (The CAUSE predicate is similar to Schank's (1973)

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 RESULT.) ALLOW is a relationship between two events in which the first makes
the second possible, but does not cause it; thus the relationship between the
wind catching the balloon and the wind carrying it into the tree I would say is
ALLOW. (Here again my usage of ALLOW is clearly closely related to Schank's
ENABLE, but is probably not identical.)

Rule 5: Reaction -> Internal Response + Overt Response

Thus a reaction consists of two parts, an internal and an overt response. The
semantic relation between these two responses is:

Rule 5': MOTIVATE (Internal Response, Overt Response)

MOTIVATE is the term used to relate thoughts to their corresponding overt
actions.

Presumably there are a large variety of types of internal responses. The two most
common, however, seem to be emotions and desires. Thus we have:
Rule 6: Internal Response -> {Emotion | Desire}
Presumably other internal responses can be aroused, but in the stories I have
analyzed these two have been sufficient. The overt response is, of course,
semantically constrained to be a plausible response for our particular internal
response.

Issues to consider

Can you think of any stories you have read or heard that do not
conform to Rumelharts model? Does the fact that they do not conform
make these stories in any way special or unusual? How do you react as
a reader or listener when a story does not follow the structure you
expect?

These two excerpts approach the problem of texture from two very
different disciplinary perspectives, one from the perspective of
linguistics and the other from the perspective of cognitive science.
What do you think are the advantages and limitations of these two
different perspectives? Can you think of certain kinds of texts for
which one perspective seems more suited than the other?

TM

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 D3 GENRES, DISCOURSE COMMUNITIES AND POWER

The two excerpts below are from two important figures in the field of genre
analysis. In the first, John Swales, clarifies the concept of discourse community
by providing six defining characteristics having to do with peoples
relationships to one another and to the texts that they use together. In the
second, Vijay Bhatia discusses the tension between creativity and conformity in
genre and how this relates to issues of power and politics among members of a
discourse community.

A.
A conceptualization of discourse community
John Swales (reprinted from J. Swales, Genre Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990, pp. 24-27)

I would now like to propose six defining characteristics that will be necessary
and sufficient for identifying a group of individuals as a discourse community.

1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.

These public goals may be formally inscribed in documents (as is often
the case with associations and clubs), or they may be more tacit. The
goals are public, because spies may join speech and discourse communities
for hidden purposes of subversion, while more ordinary people may join
organizations with private hopes of commercial or romantic advancement. In
some instances, but not in many, the goals may be high level or abstract. In a
Senate or Parliament there may well exist overtly adversarial groups of
members, but these adversaries may broadly share some common objective as
striving for improved government. In the much more typical non-adversarial
discourse communities, reduction in the broad level of agreement may fall to a
point where communication breaks down and the discourse community splits. It
is commonality of goal, not shared object of study that is criterial, even if the
former often subsumes the latter. But not always. The fact that the shared object
of study is, say, the Vatican, does not imply that students of the Vatican in history
departments, the Kremlin, dioceses, birth control agencies and liberation
theology seminaries form a discourse community.

2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its
members.
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The participatory mechanisms will vary according to the community: meetings,
telecommunications, correspondence, newsletters, conversations and so forth.
This criterion is quite stringent because it produces a negative answer to the

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case of 'The Cafe Owner Problem' (Najjar, personal communication). [n
generalized form, the problem goes as follows: individuals A, B, C and so on
occupy the same professional roles in life. They interact (in speech and writing)

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 with the same clienteles; they originate, receive and respond to the same kind of
messages for the same purposes; they have an approximately similar range of
genre skills. And yet, as cafe owners working long hours in their own
establishments, and not being members of the Local Chamber of Commerce, A,
Band C never interact with one another. Do they form a discourse community?
We can notice first that 'The Cafe Owner Problem' is not quite [ike those
situations where A, Band C operate as 'point'. A, Band C may be lighthouse
keepers on their lonely rocks, or missionaries in their separate Jungles, or
neglected consular officials in their rotting outposts. In all these cases, although
A, Band C may never interact, they all have lines of communication back to base,
and presumably acquired discourse community membership as a key element in
their initial training. Bizzell (1987) argues that the cafe owner kind of social
group will be a discourse community because 'its members may share the social-
class based or ethnically-based discursive practices of people who are likely to
become cafe owners in their neighborhood' (1987:5). However, even if this
sharing of discursive practice occurs, it does not resolve the logical problem of
assigning membership of a community to individuals who neither admit nor
recognize that such a community exists.

3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide
information and feedback.

Thus, membership implies uptake of the informational opportunities. Individuals
might pay an annual subscription to the Acoustical Society of America but if they
never open any of its communications they cannot be said to belong to the
discourse community, even though they are formally members of the society.
The secondary purposes of the information exchange will vary according to the
common goals: to improve performance in a football squad or in an orchestra, to
make money in a brokerage house, to grow better roses in a gardening club, or to
dent the research front in an academic department.

4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the
communicative furtherance of its aims. .

A discourse community has developed and continues to develop discoursal
expectations. These may involve appropriacy of topics, the form, function and
positioning of discoursal elements, and the roles texts play in the operation of
the discourse community. In so far as 'genres are how things get done, when
language is used to accomplish them' (Martin, 1985 :250), these discoursal
expectations are created by the genres that articulate the operations of the
discourse. community. One of the purposes of this criterion is to question
discourse community status for new or newly-emergent groupings. Such
groupings need, as it were, to settle down and work out their communicative TM
proceedings and practices before they can be recognized as discourse
communities. If a new grouping 'borrows' genres from other discourse

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communities, such borrowings have to be assimilated. .

5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired
some specific lexis.

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This specialization may involve using lexical items known to the wider speech
communities in special and technical ways, as in information technology
discourse communities, or using highly technical terminology as in medical
communities. Most commonly, however, the inbuilt dynamic towards an
increasingly shared and specialized terminology is realized_ through the
development of community-specific abbreviations and acronyms. The use of
these (ESL, EAP, WAC, NCTE, TOEFL,etc.) is, of course, driven by the
requirements for efficient communication exchange between "experts. It is hard
to conceive, at least in the contemporary, English-speaking world, of a group of
well-established members of a discourse community communicating among
themselves on topics relevant to the goals of the community and not using lexical
items puzzling to outsiders. It is hard to imagine attending perchance the
convention of some group of which one is an outsider and understanding every
word, If it were to happen - as might occur in the inaugural meeting of some
quite new grouping - then that grouping would not yet constitute a discourse
community.

6. A discourse community has a 'threshold level of members with a suitable degree
of relevant content and discoursal expertise.

Discourse communities have changing memberships; individuals enter as
apprentices and leave by death or in other less involuntary ways. However,
survival of the community depends on a reasonable ratio between novices and
experts.

An example of a discourse community

As we have seen, those interested in discourse communities have typically sited
their discussions within academic contexts, thus possibly creating a false
impression that such communities are only to be associated with intellectual
paradigms or scholarly cliques. Therefore, for my principal example of a
discourse community, I have deliberately chosen one that is not academic, but
which nevertheless is probably typical enough of many others. The discourse
community is a hobby group and has an 'umbrella organization' called the Hong
Kong Study Circle, of which I happen to be a member. The aims of the HKSC (note
the abbreviation) are to foster interest in and knowledge of the stamps of Hong
Kong (the various printings, etc.) and of their uses (postal rates, cancellations,
etc.). Currently there are about 320 members scattered across the world, but
with major concentrations in Great Britain, the USA and H.K. (China) itself and
minor ones in Holland and Japan. Based on the membership list, my guess is that
about a third of the members are non-native speakers of English and about TMa fifth
women. The membership varies in other ways: a few are rich and have acquired
world-class collections of classic rarities, but many are not and pursue their
hobby interest with material that costs very little to acquire. Some are full-time

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specialist dealers, auctioneers and catalogue publishers, but most are collectors.
From what little I know, the collectors vary greatly in occupation. One standard
reference work was co-authored by a stamp dealer and a Dean at Yale; another

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 was written by a retired Lieutenant-Colonel. The greatest authority on the
nineteenth century carriage of Hong Kong mail, with three books to his credit,
has recently retired from a lifetime of service as a signalman with British Rail. I
mention these brief facts to show that the members the discourse community
have, superficially at least, nothing in common except their shared hobby
interest, although Bizzell (1992) is probably correct in pointing out that there
may be psychological predispositions that attract particular people to collecting
and make them kindred spirits.

Issues to consider

The second criterion for a discourse community discussed by Swales is
that members must have a means of intercommunication among
members. He then, however, gives an example of people in the same
profession (cafe owners) who do not necessarily have a means of
communicating with one another. Do you think this group constitutes
a discourse community? Why or why not? Can you think of other
groups that have a similar ambiguous status based on this criterion or
other criteria listed by Swales?

What groups do you belong to that you think can be considered
discourse communities? What genres are associated with these
communities and how do you learn to use them? Swales says the
newly formed groups take time to settle down and establish
themselves as discourse communities. Can you think of any groups
that are in the process of becoming discourse communities but have
not yet attained full status?

B.

The power and politics of genre

Vijay K. Bhatia (reprinted from World Englishes 16(3): 359-371)

Complexity of generic forms

Although generic forms are products of conventional knowledge embedded in
disciplinary cultures, they are dynamic constructs. Typical realizations of these
institutionalized forms are often characterized by their generic integrity, oTM n the
one hand, and their propensity for innovation, on the other (see Bhatia, 1993,
1995). These two aspects of genre may appear to be somewhat contradictory at

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first, but as we shall soon discover, these two characteristics are complementary
to each other. In fact, it will not be inaccurate to suggest that one is, in a way, an
essential prerequisite to the other. Generic integrity is the product of the
conventional features of a specific generic construct. Although these conventions

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 are embedded in the rhetorical context, they often constrain the use of linguistic
resources (lexico-grammatical as well as discoursal), and are frequently invoked
to arrive at a reasonable interpretation of the genre or even determine the choice
of the genre to suit a particular context. Within generic boundaries, experienced
users of genre often manage to exercise considerable freedom to manipulate
generic conventions to respond to novel situations, to mix what Bhatia (1993)
calls 'private intentions' with socially recognized communicative purposes, and
even to produce new forms of discourse.

Therefore the tension between conformity and creativity, so often made an issue
of in applied discourse studies, is not necessarily real. As Dubrow (1982: 39)
points out, 'a concern for generic traditions, far from precluding originality, often
helps to produce it.' Similarly, Fowler (1982: 31) points out:

Far from inhibiting the author, genres are a positive support. They offer
room, as one might say, for him to write in - a habitation of mediated
definiteness, a proportioned mental space; a literary matrix by to order
his experience during composition ... The writer is invited to match
experience and form in a specific yet undetermined way. Accepting the
invitation does not solve his problems of expression ... But it gives him
access to formal ideas as to how a variety of constituents might suitably
be combined. Genre also offers a challenge by provoking a free spirit to
transcend the limitations of previous examples.

In fact, a subtle exploitation of a certain aspect of generic construct is always
seen as tactically superior and effective. It is almost like the advertiser's
exploitation of the clich the shape of things to come in the following opening
headline of an advertisement for a car.

The shape of things to come: Mitsubishi Cordia

Or, the use of the famous statement about the British colonial empire in the
Lufthansa advertisment The sun never sets on Lufthansa territory, or in the
following slogan for energy conservation, which says, Don't be fuelish, where the
whole idea of waste of energy is lost unless it is associated with 'Don't be foolish.'

The whole point about such associations is that they communicate best in the
context of what is already familiar. In such contexts, words on their own carry no
meanings; it is the experience which gives them the desired effect. Therefore, if
one is not familiar with the original, the value of the novel expression is
undermined. Just as the advertiser makes use of the well-known and the familiar
in existing knowledge, a clever genre writer makes use of what is conventionally
available to a discourse community to further his or her own subtle ends. TTM he
innovation, the creativity or the exploitation becomes effective only in the
context of the already available and familiar. The main focus of this paper is on

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these two interrelated aspects of genre theory, i.e., the constraints on generic
construction, a pre-knowledge of which gives power to insiders in specific
discourse communities, and the exploitation of this power by experienced and
expert members of such disciplinary cultures to achieve their 'private intentions'

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 within 'socially recognized communicative purposes.'

Organizational preferences and generic controls

The other interesting area of generic variation, although within a restricted
range, one finds in organizational preferences. In the case of academic
publications, we often come across what we commonly refer to as housestyles.
Although every single journal claims to have its own style sheet, most of them
can be characterized more by their overlap rather than variation.

Similarly, in the case of newspaper genres, especially the news reports and the
editorials, we find an unmistakable 'generic identity' (Bhatia, 1993) in almost all
of the exploits of these genres from various newspapers, although all of them
have their own preferences in terms of style, stance and substance. Some may be
more objective, while others more interpretative; some more socially
responsible, while others more sensational. In spite of all these differences, most
of them display common characteristics in terms of their use of generic
resources, in terms of their structure, interpretation and communication of
intentions. These somewhat different orientations to the events of the day do not
make their stories very different in terms of their generic form.

Even in the case of business communities, we often find different organizations
displaying their unique identities through their organizational preferences in the
matters of their choice of generic forms, but the broad range of genres they tend
to exploit to further their organizational objectives show remarkable similarities
rather than differences.

All these areas of generic use indicate that although their preferred generic
forms show a subtle degree of variation for what could be seen as 'tactical
advantage,' they never disregard some of the basic features of individual generic
constructs, which give these genres their essential identities.

The Power of Genre

There is no better illustration of the saying 'knowledge is power' than the one in
the case of generic power. Power to use, interpret, exploit and innovate novel
generic forms is the function of generic knowledge which is accessible only to the
members of disciplinary communities.

Maintaining generic integrity: editorial intervention

In some forms of academic discourse, especially the research articles, one cTM an
see generally two kinds of mechanism in place to ensure generic integrity: the
peer review process, and editorial intervention. Both these mechanisms, though
operating at different levels, are actively invoked to ensure that all accounts of

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new knowledge conform to the standards of institutionalized behaviour that is
expected by a community of established peers in a specific discipline. Although
individual judgements can vary within the membership of specific disciplinary

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 communities, a high degree of consensus is often ensured by selecting like-
minded scholars from within well-defined disciplinary boundaries.

After peer review, the second most important intervention comes from the
editors, who enjoy all the power one can imagine to maintain the identity and
integrity of the research article genre. Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995)
document an in-depth and fascinating study of this kind of editorial control to
maintain generic integrity. They point out that for the construction and
dissemination of knowledge 'textual activity' is as important as the 'scientific
activity.'

Generic conventions as authority: the case of citations and references

To us academics, the power of genre is nowhere better illustrated than in the
publication of research articles. Swales in his research report Aspects of Research
Article Introductions (1981) was the first one to point out the importance of the
description of previous research on the rhetorical activity of knowledge
dissemination as distinct from knowledge creation. In order to become
acceptable to the specialist community of fellow researchers, one must relate his
or her knowledge claims to the accumulated knowledge of the discipline, without
which his or her claims in the field are unlikely to find recognition through
publication.

Power to innovate (mixing and embedding)

Although this pressure for the 'democratisation' (Fairclough, 1992) of discourse
is becoming increasingly intense in some countries, especially in the USA, it is
unlikely to make a significant dent in the so-called integrity of professional
genres, at least not in the foreseeable future. However, one can see an increasing
'fragmentation of discursive norms and conventions' (Fairclough, 1992: 221),
often leading to genre-mixing and embedding in institutionalized orders of
discourse (see Bhatia, 1994, for a detailed discussion of this), on the one hand,
and creation of new genres, on the other. To a large extent, these changes in
discursive practices are making professional genres increasingly dynamic and
complex.

The dynamic complexity of academic and professional communication is further
increased by the role of multimedia, the explosion of information technology, the
multidisciplinary contexts of the world of work, the increasingly competitive
professional environment, and above all, the overwhelmingly compulsive nature
of promotional and advertising activities, so much so that our present-day world
of work is being increasingly identified as a 'consumer culture' (Featherstone,
1991). The inevitable result of this is that many of the institutionalized genres,
TM
whether they are social, professional or academic, are seen as incorporating
elements of promotion. Fairclough (1992: 207) rightly associates some of these

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changes with what he calls 'commodification' of institutional orders of discourse.

Referring to such changes in discourse practices, he (1993: 141) points out, ...
there is an extensive restructuring of boundaries between orders of discourse

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 and between discursive practices, for example, the genre of consumer
advertising has been colonising professional and public service orders of
discourse on a massive scale, generating many new hybrid partly promotional
genres ... As an instance of such a hybrid genre, Fairclough (1993) discusses the
case of contemporary university prospectuses, where he highlights an increasing
tendency towards marketization of the discursive practices of British
universities. Bhatia (1995), in his discussion of genre-mixing in professional
discourse, gives examples from several settings, where genre-mixing and
embedding is becoming increasingly common. He also mentions several
instances where one may find an increasing use of promotional strategies in
genres which are traditionally considered non-promotional in intent, especially
academic introductions, including book introductions, forewords, prefaces of
various kinds, which are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from
publishers' blurbs.

Shared knowledge - privileged access/insider information

If generic conventions, on the one hand, give suitable expression to the
communicative intentions of genre writers (who are members of a particular
discourse community), on the other hand, they also match their intentions
against their intended reader's expectations. This is possible only when all the
participants share, not only the code, but also the knowledge of the genre, which
includes the knowledge of its construction, interpretation and use. A necessary
implication of this shared genre knowledge is that it is not routinely available to
the outsiders, which creates a kind of social distance between the legitimate
members of a discourse community and those who are considered outsiders.

Although this creates conditions of homogeneity between the insiders, at the
same time it also increases social distance between them and the outsiders,
sometimes resulting in disastrous consequences for the one who does not have
access to such shared knowledge. This shared knowledge could be in the form of
linguistic resources used to construct a generic form, or it could be in the
awareness of the rules of language use, some of which are socially learnt, as the
ones associated with classroom discourse and academic genres, while others can
be legally enforced, such as the ones associated with courtroom procedures.
Maintaining solidarity within a professional community

One of the most noticeable characteristics of any professional or academic
discourse community is the availability and typical use of a range of appropriate
genres, which their members think serve the goals of their community. The
recurrent use of such discoursal forms create solidarity within its membership
giving them their most powerful weapon to keep the outsiders at a safe distance.
Hudson (1979: 1) rightly claims, TM

If one wished to kill a profession, to remove its cohesion and its strength,

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the most effective way would be to forbid the use of its characteristic
language.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that most of the attempts by the powerful

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 reformist lobbies in many Western democracies to introduce plain English in
legislative contexts are seen as imposition from outside and have been firmly
rejected by the professional legal community.

Issues to consider

According to Bhatia, genres are defined by the tension between their
generic integrity and their potential for innovation. IN fact, he argues
that these two aspects of genre work together: that generic
conventions provide the basis for innovation. What happens when
genres loose their generic integrity? What happens when they loose
their propensity for innovation?

There is no better illustration of the saying knowledge is power',
says Bhatia, than the one in the case of generic power. This is
particularly true, he says, when it comes to professional genres. Can
you think of examples of how the power to use, interpret and innovate
particular genres allows certain people to exert power or control over
other people?

TM

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 D4 IDEOLOGIES IN DISCOURSE
The excerpts presented in this section discuss some of the basic conceptual and
analytical tools you can use to do critical discourse analysis. The first is from
Norman Faircloughs Discoruse and social change, one of the classic works in
discourse analysis devoted to the study of discourse and ideology. In this excerpt
Fairclough explains the concept of intertextuality and its relationship with
ideology. The second excerpt is from James Paul Gees book Social linguistics and
literacies. In this excerpt Gee also takes up the topic of intertextuality, or, as he
calls it, heteroglossia, in his analysis of a label on an aspirin bottle. He also
discusses cultural models (see Section A4) and their relationship to power and
ideology.

A.
Intertextuality

Norman Fairclough (reprinted from Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1992, pp. 101-2).

The term intertextuality was coined by Kristeva in the late 1960s in the context
of her influential accounts for western audiences of the work of Bakhtin (see
Kristeva 1986a, actually written in 1966). Although the term is not Bakhtin's, the
development of an intertextual (or in his own terms translinguistic) approach to
analysis of texts was a major theme of his work throughout his academic career,
and was closely linked to other important issues including his theory of genre
(see Bakhtin 1986, a paper he wrote in the early 1950s).

Bakhtin points to the relative neglect of the communicative functions of language
within mainstream linguistics, and more specifically to the neglect of ways in
which texts and utterances are shaped by prior texts that they are responding
to, and by subsequent texts that they anticipate. For Bakhtin, all utterances,
both spoken and written, from the briefest of turns in a conversation to a
scientific paper or a novel, are demarcated by a change of speaker (or writer),
and are oriented retrospectively to the utterances of previous speakers (be they
turns, scientific articles, or novels) and prospectively to the anticipated
utterances of the next speakers. Thus each utterance is a link in the chain of
speech communication. All utterances are populated, and indeed constituted, by
snatches of others utterances, more or less explicit or complete: our speech ... is
filled with others words, varying degrees of otherness and varying degrees of
"our-own-ness", varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words TM of
others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which
we assimilate, rework, and reaccentuate' (Bakhtin 1986: 89). That is utterances--

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'texts' in my terms-- are inherently intertextual, constituted by elements of other
texts. Foucault adds the refinement of distinguishing within the intertextual aura
of a text different fields of presence, 'concomitance', and memory.

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 The salience of the concept of intertextuality in the framework I am developing
accords with my focus upon discourse and social change. Kristeva observes that
intertextuality implies the insertion of history (society) into a text and of this
text into history' (1986a: 39). By the insertion of history into a text, she means
that the text absorbs and is built out of texts from the past (texts being the major
artefacts that constitute history). By the insertion of the text into history, she
means that the text responds to, reaccentuates, and reworks past texts, and in so
doing helps to make history and contributes to wider processes of change, as
well as anticipating and trying to shape subsequent texts. This inherent
historicity of texts enables them to take on the major roles they have in
contemporary soclety. at the leading edge of social and cultural change. The
rapid transformation and restructuring of textual traditions and orders of
discourse is a strong contemporary phenomenon, which suggests that
intertextuality ought to be a major focus in discourse analysis.

Issues to consider

In this excerpt, Fairclough quotes Kristiva as saying that
intertextuality involves the insertion of history (society) into a text
and of this text into history. How do you interpret this statement?
What role can texts play in affecting the way we interpret past events
and past texts? What role can they play in affecting future events, that
is, creating social change?

B.

Ideology, Social Languages and Cultural Models

James Paul Gee (reprinted from Social Linguistics and Literacies, London: Taylor and
Francis, 1996, pp. 69-79)

Heteroglossia

It is important to extend our discussion of social languages by pointing out that
they are very often 'impure '. That is, when we speak or write, we very often mix
together different social languages. This is a practice that the Russian literary
theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986) called heteroglossia (multiple voices)
To see a clear example of such heteroglossia, and its ties to sociopolitical
realities, consider the following warning(s) taken from a bottle of aspirin.
.
TM
Warnings: Children and teenagers should not use this medication for
chicken pox or flu symptoms before a doctor is consulted about Reye
Syndrome, a rare but serious illness reported to be associated with

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aspirin. Keep this and all drugs out of the reach of children. In case of
accidental overdose, seek professional assistance or contact a poison
control center immediately. As with any drug, if you are pregnant or
nursing a baby, seek the advice of a health professional before using this

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 product. IT IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT NOT TO USE ASPIRIN DURING
THE LAST 3 MONTHS OF PREGNANCY UNLESS SPECIFICALLY DIRECTED
TO DO SO BY A DOCTOR BECAUSE IT MAY CAUSE PROBLEMS IN THE
UNBORN CHILD OR COMPLICATIONS DURING DELIVERY, See carton for
arthritis use and Important Notice.

This text starts with a sentence of very careful and very specific
information indeed: the initial sentence talks (in bold) about 'children and
teenagers'; it specially says 'this medication'; gives us an exclusive list of two
relevant diseases, 'chicken pox or flu '; mentions a specific syndrome, Reye
Syndrome, and explicitly tells us that it is 'rare but serious'. Then, all of a sudden,
with the second sentence we enter a quite different sort of language, marked
both by the phrasing and by the disappearance of the bold print. Now, the text
talks not about aspirin specifically, as in the first sentence, but about 'this and all
drugs' (second sentence) and 'any drug' (fourth sentence). We are told to keep
'this and all drugs' out of the reach of' children', but what now has happened to
the teenagers? We get three different references to the medical profession, none
of them as direct and specific as 'doctor' (which was used in the first sentence):
'professional assistance', 'poison control center', and 'health professional'. We
are told to seek help in case of 'accidental overdose', making us wonder what
should happen if the overdose was not accidental. The language of this middle
part of the text speaks out of a (seemingly not all that dangerous) world where
institutional systems (companies, professionals, centers) take care of people who
only through ignorance (which these systems can cure) get themselves into
trouble. Then, all of a sudden, again, we make a transition back to the social
language of the opening of the text, but this time it is shouted at us in bold
capitals. We are confronted with the phrase 'especially important'. We return to
quite specific language: we again get 'aspirin', rather than 'all drugs' or 'any
drug', time is handled quite specifically ('last 3 months'), we no longer 'seek
assistance or advice' from 'professionals', rather we once again consult with our
'doctor' and do not take the aspirin 'unless specifically directed'. This is, once
again, a dangerous world in which we had better do what (and only what) the
doctor says. This dire warning about pregnancy, however, does make us wonder
why a rather general and gentle warning about pregnancy and nursing is
embedded in the more moderate language of the middle of the text. The text
ends with small print, which appears to tell us to look on the carton for an
'Important Notice' (weren't these 'warnings' the important notice?).

So, in this text we have at least two rather different social languages (voices)
intermingled, juxtaposed rather uncomfortably side by side. Why? At one time,
the aspirin bottle had only the middle text (sentences 2, 3, and 4) on it as a
'warning' (singular). Various medical, social, cultural, and political changes,
including conflicts between and among governmental institutions, medical TM
workers, consumers, and drug companies, have led to the intrusion of the more
direct and sharper voice that begins and ends the 'warnings'. Thus, we see, the

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different social languages in this text are sedimented there by social, political,
and cultural happenings unfolding in history. In fact, even what looks like a
uniform social language - for example, the moderate middle of this text - is very
often a compendium of different social languages with different historical, social,

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 cultural, and political sources, and looks to us now to be uniform only because
the workings of multiple social languages have been forgotten and effaced.

Similarity in the 'Eye of the Beholder'

One of the key ways humans think about the world is through seeking out
similarities (Hofstadter and the fluid Analogies Research Group 1995; Holyoak
and Thagard 1995). We try to understand something new in terms of how it
resembles something old. We attempt to see the new thing as a type, thus, like
other things of the same or similar type. And very often a great deal hangs on
these judgments: for example, is spanking a child a type of discipline or a type of
child abuse? When we answer this question we claim either that spanking a child
is more similar to paradigmatic instances of discipline or to paradigmatic
instances of child abuse.

Judgments like whether spanking is discipline or child abuse are still 'open' and
widely discussed in the culture thanks to on-going social changes. However, any
language is full of such similarity judgments that have been made long ago in the
history of the language - in another time and another place - and which are now
taken for granted and rarely reflected upon by current speakers of the language.
Let me take another example that is relevant to those of us interested in
language and learning. Consider a sentence like 'The teacher taught the students
French' (see also Birch 1989: pp. 25-29; Halliday 1976). This sentence has the
same grammar as (the language treats it the same as) sentences like john handed
Mary the gun', john gave Mary the gun', John sent Mary the gun', and many more.
This type of sentence seems to mean (if we consider prototypical cases like 'give',
'hand', and 'send') that an agent transfers something to someone.

And so we are led to think of teaching French as transferring something (French)
from one person (the teacher) to someone else (the student), though this
transfer is a mental one, rather than a physical one. This suggestion (about the
meaning of teaching languages), which we pick up from our grammar, happens
to fit with one of the most pervasive ways of thinking, (what I will later call a
master myth) embedded in our language and in culture. We tend to think of
meaning as something speakers or writers take out of their heads (its original
container), package, like a gift, into a package or container (i.e., words and
sentences) and convey (transfer) to hearers, who unpackage it and place its
contents (j.e., 'meaning') into their heads (its final container).

This container/conveyor metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Reddy
1979) is, as we will see below, a fallacious view of meaning. It gives rise to
idioms like 'I catch your meaning', 'I can't grasp what you are saying', 'I've TM got
it', 'Let me put the matter in plain terms', 'I can't put this into words', and a great
many more. So, it is easy for us to accept the suggestion of our grammar and see
teaching languages as a form of mental transference of neatly wrapped little

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packages (drills, grammar lessons, vocabulary lists) along a conveyor belt from
teacher to student.

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 At a more subtle level, the fact that 'The teacher teaches the students French' has
the same grammar as 'The teacher teaches the students history (physics,
linguistics, algebra), suggests that teaching a language (like French) is a
comparable activity to teaching a disciplinary' content like physics (Halliday
1976). Our schools, with their classrooms, curricula, discrete class hours (five
times a week for an hour we learn French), encourage us further to think that,
since all these teachers are standing in the same sort of space, playing the same
sort of role in the system, they could be or even must be doing the same (sort of)
thing.

We note, as well, that the driving teacher spends too much time in a car and the
coach spends too much time on the field to be respected as teachers.
Note, too, that we don't say things like 'The coach teaches football' football
cannot be taught, one can only help someone master it in a group with other
apprentices. Our mental model of teaching makes us compare 'teaching French'
to 'teaching history' and not to 'coaching football' or 'training someone to drive',
despite the fact that it may well be that learning a language is a lot more like
learning to drive a car or play football than it is like learning history or physics.

What we see here, then, is that language encapsulates a great many frozen
theories (generalizations about what is similar to what) - we have just witnessed
frozen theories of communication and language acquisition. We do not have to
accept the theories our various social languages offer us. Though we can hardly
reflect on them all, we can reflect on some of them and come to see things in new
ways

Meaning

Having established the context of social languages, we can turn directly to
meaning. Meaning is one of the most debated terms in linguistics, philosophy,
literary theory, and the social sciences. To start our discussion of meaning, let
us pick a word and ask what it means. Say we ask: 'What does the word sofa
mean?'

Imagine that my friend Susan and I go into my living room, where I have a small
white, rather broken down seat big enough for more than one person, and a
larger and nicer one. I point to the larger, nicer one and say, 'That sofa has a stain
on it.' Susan sees nothing exceptional about what I have said, assumes we both
mean the same thing by the word 'sofa', and points to the smaller object, saying,
'Well, that sofa has a lot more stains on it.' I say, 'That's not a sofa, it's a settee.'
Now Susan realizes that she and I do not, in fact, mean the same thing by the
word 'sofa'. TM

"Why? The reason is that I am making a distinction between two words, 'sofa'
and 'settee', where something is either the one or the other, and not both, while

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Susan does not make such a distinction, either because she does not have the
word 'settee' or because she uses it in the same way as she uses 'sofa'. When I
use the word 'sofa', I mean it to exclude the word 'settee' as applicable; when I

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 use the word 'settee', I mean it to exclude the word 'sofa'. Susan, of course, does
not exactly know the basis on which I make the distinction between 'sofa' and
'settee' (how and why I distinguish 'sofa' and 'settee'), a matter to which we will
turn in the next section.

Now someone else, Kris, comes in, having overheard our conversation, and says,
'That's not a settee, nor a sofa, it's a divan.' I and Susan now realize that when
Kris uses the word 'divan', she distinguishes among the words 'sofa', 'settee', and
'divan'.

Now, assume that I say Well they are both couches,' and we all agree on this.
This shows that my use of the word 'couch' does not exclude' sofa' or 'settee' as
(also possibly) applicable, nor do these words exclude 'couch', though they
exclude each other. And for Susan and Kris the use of the word 'couch' does not
exclude their other words (which are different than mine), nor do their other
words exclude 'couch' (though their other words exclude each other). Thus, by
default almost, we mean (pretty much) the same thing by' couch'.

What is emerging here is that what we mean by a word depends on which other
words we have available to us and which other words our use of the word (e.g.,
'sofa') is meant to exclude or not exclude as possibly also applying (e.g., 'sofa'
excludes 'settee', but not 'couch'). It also depends on which 'Words are 'available'
to me in a given situation. For example, I may sometimes use the word 'love seat',
which I consider a type of settee, but in. the above situation with Susan and Kris I
may have not viewed this as a possible choice, perhaps because I am reluctant to
use the term in front of close friends who might think it too 'fancy. This is to say
that I am currently using a social language in which 'love seat is not available.

The sorts of factors we have seen thus far in our discussion of 'sofa' reflect
one central principle involved in meaning, a principle I will call the exclusion
principle. Susan, Kris, and I all have the word 'sofa', but it means different'
things to each of us because each of has a different set of related words. The
exclusion principle says that the meaning of a word is (in part there are other
principles) a matter of what other words my use of a given word in a given
situation is intended to exclude or not exclude as also possibly applicable
(though not actually used in this case). Meaning is always (in part)
a matter of intended exclusions and exclusions (contrasts and lack of contrasts)
within the assumed semantic field.

*

Cultural Models as the Basis of Meaning Choices and Guesses

TM
So far I have left out one crucial principle of meaning. This is the principle that
determines what I have called the basis of the distinctions we make (e.g., 'sofa'
versus 'settee', with 'couch' applicable to both). Why do we mean the way we do?

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To get at what constitutes the basis of our choices and assumptions in the use of
words, let us consider what the word 'bachelor' means (Fillmore 1975; Quinn

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 and Holland 1987). All of us think we know what the word means. Dictionaries
say it means 'an unmarried man' (Webster Handy College Dictionary, 1972),
because it seems clear that in most contexts in which the word is used it excludes
as applicable words like 'woman', 'girl', 'boy', and 'married': Let me ask you, then,
is the Pope a bachelor? Is a thrice-divorced man a bachelor? Is a young man who
has been in an irreversible coma since childhood a bachelor? What about a
eunuch? A committed gay man? An elderly senile gentleman who has never been
married? The answer to all these questions is either 'no' or 'I'm not sure' (as I
have discovered by asking a variety of people). Why? Alter all, all these people
are unmarried men.

The reason why the answer to these questions is 'no', despite the fact that they
all involve cases of clearly unmarried males, is that in using the word 'bachelor'
we are making exclusions we are unaware of and are assuming that the contexts
in which we use the word are clear and transparent when they are not. Context
has the nasty habit of almost always seeming clear, transparent, and
unproblematic, when it hardly ever actually is.

Our meaningful distinctions (our choices and guesses) are made on the basis of
certain beliefs and values. This basis is a type of theory, in the case of many
words a social theory. The theories that form the basis of such choices and
assumptions have a particular character. They involve (usually unconscious)
assumptions about models of simplified worlds. Such models are sometimes
called cultural models, folk theories, scenes, schemas, or frames. I will call them
cultural models.

I think of cultural models as something like movies or videotapes in the mind.
We all have a vast store of these tapes, each of which depicts prototypical (what
we take to be 'normal') events in a simplified world. We all have a vast store of
these tapes, each of which depicts prototypical (what we take to be normal)
events in a simplified world. We conventionally take these simplified worlds to
be the 'real' world, or act as if they were. We make our choices and guesses about
meaning in relation to these worlds.

These cultural models are emblematic visions of an idealized, 'normal', 'typical'
reality, in much the way that, say, a Bogart movie is emblematic of the world of
the 'tough guy' or an early Woody Allan movie of the 'sensitive, but klutzy male'.
They are also variable, differing across different cultural groups, including
different cultural groups in a society speaking the same language. They change
with time and other changes in the society, but we are usually quite unaware we
are using them and of their full implications.

These cultural models are, then, pictures of simplified worlds in which TM
prototypical events unfold. The most commonly used cultural model for the
word 'bachelor' is (or used to be) something like the following (Fillmore 1975):

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Men marry women at a certain age; marriages last for life; and in such a world, a
bachelor is a man who stays unmarried beyond the usual age, thereby becoming
eminently marriageable. We know that this simplified world is not always true,
but it is the one against which we use the word 'bachelor', that is, make choices

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 about what other words are excluded as applicable or not, and make
assumptions about what the relevant context is in a given case of using a word.
Thus, the Pope is not a bachelor because he just isn't in this simplified world,
being someone who has vowed not to marry at any age. Nor are gay men, since
they have chosen not to marry women.

Such cultural models involve us in exclusions that are not at first obvious and
which we are often quite unaware of making. In the case of 'bachelor' we are
actually excluding words like 'gay' and 'priest' as applying to ('normal')
unmarried men, and in doing so, we are assuming that men come in two
('normal') types: ones who et married early and ones who get married late. This
assumption marginalizes people who do not want to get married or do not want
to marry members of the opposite sex. It is part of the function of such cultural
models to set up what count as central, typical cases, and what count as marginal,
non-typical cases.

There is even a more subtle exclusion being made via this cultural model. If men
become 'eminently marriageable' when they stay unmarried beyond the usual
age, then this can' only be because we have assumed that after that age there is a
shortage of 'desirable'men and a surplus of women who want them, women who,
thus, are not 'eminently marriageable', or, at least, not as 'eminently
marriageable' as the men. Hence, we get the most common cultural model
associated with 'spinster'. So we see that our usual use of 'bachelor' involves also
an exclusion of the phrase 'eminently marriageable' as applicable to 'older'
women, and the assumption that the reverse of 'bachelor', namely 'spinster', is
applicable.

Such hidden exclusions areideological. They involve social theories (remember,
cultural models are a type of theory), quite tacit ones involving beliefs about the
distribution of goods prestige, power, desirability, centrality in society.
Furthermore, the fact that we are usually unaware of using these cultural models
and of their full implications means that the assumptions they embody are the
distribution of social goods appear to us natural, obvious, just the ways things
are, inevitable, even appropriate. And this is so despite the fact that cultural
models vary across both different cultures and different social groups.

Issues to consider

The mixing of social languages; that Gee observes on the bottle of
aspirin is also a kind of intertextuality, sometimes called
interdiscursivity. This kind of intertextuality occurs when larger
aspects of discourse like speech styles, social languages, genres, TM and
even ideologies are borrowed from others. What do you think the
reason for and effect of mixing social languages were in this text? Can
you think of other texts that mix broader aspects of discourse (such as

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social languages or genres) in order to strategically advance a
particular ideology or to present the authors or the readers as certain
kinds of people?

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Gee says that our choices of and assumptions about the meanings of
words are often determined by cultural models, which are idealized
versions of normal, typical reality. Cultural models often involve
ideas about certain types of people, such as bachelors and how they
are supposed to act. Consider the cultural models surrounding some
kind of important event or activity in your society (such as studying in
university or getting married). What sorts of cultural models does
your society associate with these events or activities? What kinds of
people do the cultural models include, and what kinds of people do
they marginalize or exclude.

TM

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 D5 TWO PERSPECTIVES ON CONVERSATION

The two readings in this section represent two different perspectives on
conversation. The first, by John Austin, is a basic outline of the principles of
speech act theory. In particular, Austin makes an argument about why a
perspective which focuses only on the propositional content of utterances cannot
adequately explain how people actually use language. The second excerpt is from
a classic article by conversation analyst Emanuel Schegloff. The focus of the
article is conversational closings, but Schegloff uses this topic to illustrate one of
the basic principles of adjacency pairs, the principle of conditional relevance.

A.

How to do things with words

John L. Austin (reprinted from How to do things with words, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990, pp. 359-371)

What I shall have to say here is neither difficult nor contentious; the only merit I
should like to claim for it is that of being true, at least in parts. The phenomenon
to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and it cannot fail to have been
already noticed, at least here and there, by others. Yet I have not found attention
paid to it specifically.

It was for too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a
'statement' can only be to 'describe' some state of affairs, or to 'state some fact',
which it must do either truly or falsely. Grammarians, indeed, have regularly
pointed out that not all 'sentences' are (used in making) statements: there are,
traditionally, besides (grammarians') statements, also questions and
exclamations, and sentences expressing commands or wishes or concessions.
And doubtless philosophers have not intended to deny this, despite some loose
use of 'sentence' for 'statement'. Doubtless, too, both grammarians and
philosophers have been aware that it is by no means easy to distinguish even
questions, commands, and so on from statements by means of the few and jejune
grammatical marks available, such as word order, mood, and the like: though
perhaps it has not been usual to dwell on the difficulties which this fact obviously
raises . For how do we decide which is which? What are the limits and definitions
of each?

But now in recent years, many things which would once have been accepted
without question as 'statements' by both philosophers and grammarians hTM ave
been scrutinized with new care . . . . It has come to be commonly held that many
utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only

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intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the
facts: for example, 'ethical propositions' are perhaps intended, solely or partly, to
evince emotion or to prescribe conduct or to influence it in special ways . . . . We
very often also use utterances in ways beyond the scope at least of traditional

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 grammar. It has come to be seen that many specially perplexing words
embedded in apparently descriptive statements do not serve to indicate some
specially odd additional feature in the reality reported, but to indicate (not to
report) the circumstances in which the statement is made or reservations to
which it is subject or the way in which it is to be taken and the like . To overlook
these possibilities in the way once common is called the 'descriptive' fallacy; but
perhaps this is not a good name, as 'descriptive' itself is special. Not all true or
false statements are descriptions, and for this reason I prefer to use the word
'Constative' . . .Utterances can be found . . . such that:

A. they do not 'describe' or 'report' or constate anything at all, are not
'true or false' ; and

B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action,
which again would not normally be described as, or as 'just', saying
something .

Examples:
(a) I do (sc . take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)' - as uttered in
the course of the marriage ceremony.
(b) 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' - as uttered when smashing the
bottle against the stern.
(c) 'I give and bequeath my watch to my brother' - as occurring in a will.
(d) 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.'

In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the
appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said
in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. None of the
utterances cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it.
It needs argument no more than that 'damn' is not true or false: it may be that
the utterance 'serves to inform you' - but that is quite different. To name the ship
is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) the words 'I name, etc.' . When I say,
before the registrar or attar, 'I do', I am not reporting on a marriage: I am
indulging in it.

What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a
performatire sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, 'a performative'.
The term 'performative' will be used in a variety of cognate ways and
constructions, much as the term 'imperative' is. The name is derived, of course,
from 'perform', the usual verb with the noun 'action': it indicates that the issuing
of the utterance is the performing of an action - it is not normally thought of as
just saying something. Are we then to say things like this:
TM
'To marry is to say a few words', or
'Betting is simply saying something'?

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Such a doctrine sounds odd or even flippant at first, but with sufficient
safeguards it may become not odd at all.

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 *

The uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the
performance of the act (of betting or what not), the performance of which is also
the object of the utterance, but it is far from being usually, even if it is ever, the
sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed. Speaking
generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are
uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly
necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform
certain other actions, whether 'physical' or 'mental' actions or even acts of
uttering further words . Thus, for naming the ship, it is essential that I should be
the person appointed to name her; for (Christian) marrying, it is essential that I
should not be already married with a wife living, sane and undivorced, and so on;
for a bet to have been made, it is generally necessary for the offer of the bet to
have been accepted by a taker (who must have done something, such as to say
'Done'); and it is hardly a gift if I say, 'I give it you' but never hand it over . . . .

But we may, in objecting, have something totally different, and this time quite
mistaken, in mind, especially when we think of some of the more awe-inspiring
performatives such as 'I promise to . . .' . Surely the words must be spoken
'seriously' and so as to be taken 'seriously'? This is, though vague, true enough in
general - it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any
utterance whatsoever. I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem. . . .

Well we shall next consider what we actually do say about the utterance
concerned when one or another of its normal concomitants is absent . In no case
do we say that the utterance was false but rather that the utterance - or rather
the act, e.g., the promise - was void, or given in bad faith, or not implemented, or
the like. In the particular case of promising, as with many other performatives, it
is appropriate that the person uttering the promise should have a certain
intention, viz. here to keep his word: and perhaps of all concomitants this looks
the most suitable to be that which 'I promise' does describe or record. Do we not
actually, when such intention is absent, speak of a 'false' promise? Yet so to
speak is not to say that the utterance 'I promise that . . .' is false, in the sense that
though he states that he does he doesn't, or that though lie describes he
misdescribes - misreports. For he does promise: the promise here is not even
void, though it is given in bad faith . His utterance is perhaps misleading,
probably deceitful and doubtless wrong, but it is not a lie or a misstatement . At
most we might make out a case for saying that it implies or insinuates a
falsehood or a misstatement (to the effect that he does intend to do something):
but that is a very different matter . Moreover, we do not speak of a false bet or a
false christening; and that we do speak of a false promise need commit us no
more than the fact that we speak of a false move. 'False' is not necessarily uTM sed of
statements only.

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*

Besides the uttering of the words of so-called performative, a good many other

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 things have as a general rule to be right and to go right if we are to be said to
have happily brought off our action. What these are we may hope to discover by
looking at and classifying types of case in which something goes wrong and the
act -- marrying, betting, bequeathing, christening, or what not - is therefore at
least to some extent a failure: the utterance is then, we may say, not indeed false
but in general unhappy. And for this reason we call the doctrine of the things that
can be and go wrong on the occasion of such utterances, the doctrine of the
Infelicities.

Suppose we try first to state schematically - and I do not wish to claim any
sort of finality for this scheme - some at least of the things which are necessary
for the smooth or 'happy' functioning of a performative (or at least of a highly
developed explicit performative, such as we have hitherto been alone concerned
with), and then give examples of infelicities and their effects . . . .

A. 1 There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain
conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by
certain persons in certain circumstances, and further,
A.2 the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be
appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked .
B.1 The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
B. 2 completely.
C.1 Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain
thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on
the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the
procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must
intend so to conduct themselves, and further
C.2 must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.

Now if we sin against any one (or more) of these six rules, our performative
utterance will be (in one way or another) unhappy.

Issues to consider

Some of the felicity conditions for speech act are external, that is, they
can be determined through observation. Things like the time, place
and people involved are examples. But some are internal, having to do
with the intentions, thoughts, feelings and even sanity of the person
issuing the speech act or the person to who it is being issued. What
complications does this introduce for the successful interpretation of
speech acts?
TM
The feminist critic Judith Butler (1990/2006) says that when a doctor
announces the gender of a newborn baby (e.g. Its a girl!), he or she is
issuing a performative. It is by naming the childs gender that gender is

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assigned. Do you agree with this interpretation? What conditions do
you think must be met for such a speech act to be felicitous?

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 B.
Opening up closings

Emanuel A. Schegloff and Harvey Sacks (reprinted from Semiotica 7, 1973: 289-
327)

It seems useful to begin by formulating the problem of closing technically in
terms of the more fundamental order of organization, that of turns . Two basic
features of conversation are proposed to be: (1) at least, and no more than, one
party speaks at a time in a single conversation; and (2) speaker change recurs.

The achievement of these features singly, and especially the achievement of their
cooccurrence, is accomplished by co-conversationalists through the use of a
'machinery' for ordering speaker turns sequentially in conversation. The turn-
taking machinery includes as one component a set of procedures for organizing
the selection of 'next speakers', and, as another, a set of procedures for locating
the occasions on which transition to a next speaker mayor should occur. The
turn-taking machinery operates utterance by utterance. That is to say, it is within
any current utterance that possible next speaker selection is accomplished, and
upon possible completion of any current utterance that such selection takes
effect and transition to a next speaker becomes relevant. We shall speak of this
as the 'transition relevance ' of possible utterance completion Whereas these
basic features deal with a conversation's ongoing orderliness, they make no
provision for the closing of conversation. A machinery that includes the
transition relevance of possible utterance completion recurrently for any
utterance in the conversation generates an indefinitely extendable string of turns
to talk. Then, an initial problem concerning closings may be formulated: HOW TO
ORGANIZE THE SIMULTANEOUS ARRIVAL OF THE CO-CONVERSATIONALISTS
AT A POINT WHERE ONE SPEAKER'S COMPLETION WILL NOT OCCASION
ANOTHER SPEAKER'S TALK, AND THAT WILL NOT BE HEARD AS SOME
SPEAKER'S SILENCE. The last qualification is necessary to differentiate closings
from other places in conversation where one speaker's completion is not
followed by a possible next speaker 's talk, but where, given the continuing
relevance of the basic features and the turn-taking machinery, what is heard is
not termination but attributable silence, a pause in the last speaker's utterance,
etc. It should suggest why simply to stop talking is not a solution to the closing
problem: any first prospective speaker to do so would be hearable as ' being
silent' in terms of the turn-taking machinery, rather than as having suspended its
relevance

How is the transition relevance of possible utterance completion lifted? A TM
proximate solution involves the use of a 'terminal exchange' composed of
conventional parts, e .g., an exchange of 'good -byes' We note first that the
terminal exchange is a case of a class of utterance sequences which we have been

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studying for some years, namely, the utterance pair, or, as we shall refer to it, the
adjacency pair Briefly, adjacency pairs consist of sequences which properly
have the following features: (1) two utterance length, (2) adjacent positioning of

190
 component utterances, (3) different speakers producing each utterance . The
component utterances of such sequences have an achieved relatedness beyond
that which may otherwise obtain between adjacent utterances. That relatedness
is partially the product of the operation of a typology in the speakers' production
of the sequences. The typology operates in two ways: it partitions utterance
types into ' first pair parts' (i.e., first parts of pairs) and second pair parts; and it
affiliates a first pair part and a second pair part to form a ' pair type'. 'Question-
answer', 'greeting-greeting,' 'offer-acceptance/ refusal ' are instances of pair
types. . Adjacency pair sequences, then, exhibit the further features (4) relative
ordering of parts (i. e. first pair parts precede second pair parts) and (5)
discriminative relations (i .e. , the pair type of which a first pair part is a member
is relevant to the selection among second pair parts)

In the case of that type of organization which we are calling 'overall structural
organization ', it may be noted that at least initial sequences (e.g., greeting
exchanges), and ending sequences (i. e ., terminal exchanges) employ adjacency
pair formats. It is the recurrent, institutionalized use of adjacency pairs for such
types of organization problems that suggests that these problems have, in part, a
common character, and that adjacency pair organization.is specially fitted to
the solution of problems of that character.

But it may be wondered why are two utterances required for either opening or
closing? What two utterances produced by different speakers can do that one
utterance cannot do it: by an adjacently positioned second, a speaker can show
that he understood what a prior aimed at, and that he is willing to go along with
that. Also, by virtue of the occurrence of an adjacently produced second, the doer
of a first can see that what he intended was indeed understood, and that it was or
was not accepted.

We are then proposing: If WHERE transition relevance is to be lifted is a
systematic problem, an adjacency pair solution can work because : by providing
that transition relevance is to be lifted after the second pair part's occurrence ,
the occurrence of the second pair part can then reveal an appreciation of, and
agreement to, the intention of closing NOW which a first part of a terminal
exchange reveals its speaker to propose. Given the institutionalization of that
solution, a range of ways of assuring that it be employed have been developed ,
which make drastic difference between one party saying "good-bye" and not
leaving a slot for the other to reply, and one party saying "good-bye" and leaving
a slot for the other to reply.

The former becomes a distinct sort of activity, expressing anger, brusqueness,
and the like , and available to such a use by contrast with the latter. It is this
consequentiality of alternatives that is the hallmark of an institutionalized TM
solution

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In referring to the components of terminal exchanges , we have so far employed
"good-bye" as an exclusive instance. But, it plainly is not exclusively used. Such
other components as "ok", "see you", "thank you", "you' re welcome" , and the
like are also used . Since the latter items are used in other ways as well, the mere

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 fact of their use does not mark them as unequivocal parts of terminal exchanges.
The adjacency pair is one kind of 'local', i. e., utterance, organization. It does
NOT appear that FIRST parts of terminal exchanges are placed by reference to
that order of organization. While they, of course, occur after some utterance, they
are not placed by reference to a location that might be formulated as 'next' after
some ' last' utterance or class of utterances. Rather, their placement seems to be
organized by reference to a properly initiated closing SECTION.

The [relevant] aspect of overall conversational organization concerns the
organization of topic talk ... If we may refer to what gets talked about in a
conversation as 'mentionables', then we can note that there are considerations
relevant for conversationalists in ordering and distributing their talk about
mentionables in a single conversation. There is, for example, a position in a
single conversation for 'first topic'. We intend to mark by this term not the
simple serial fact that some topic gets talked about temporally prior to others,
for some temporally prior topics such as, for example, ones prefaced by "First , I
just want to say ... ", or topics that are minor developments by the receiver of the
conversational opening of "how are you" inquiries , are not heard or treated as
'first topic' is to accord it to a certain special status in the conversation. Thus, for
example, to make a topic ' first topic' may provide for its analyzability (by
coparticipants) as 'the reason for' the conversation, that being, furthermore , a
preservable and reportable feature of the conversation. In addition, making a
topic 'first topic' may accord it a special importance on the part of its initiator .
These features of 'first topics' may pose a problem for conversationalists who
may not wish to have special importance accorded some 'mentionable', and who
may not want it preserved as 'the reason for the conversation'. It is by reference
to such problems affiliated with the use of first topic position that we may
appreciate such exchanges at the beginnings of conversations in which news IS
later reported, as:

A: What 's up.
B: Not much. What's up with you?
A: Nothing.
Conversationalists, then, can have mentionables they do not want to put in first
topic position, and there are ways of talking past first topic position without
putting them in.

A further feature of the organization of topic talk seems to involve 'fitting' as
a preferred procedure . That is, it appears that a preferred way of getting
mentionables mentioned is to employ the resources of the local organization of
utterances in the course of the conversation. That involves holding off the
mention of a mentionable until it can 'occur naturally', that is, until it can be
fitted to another conversationalist's prior utterance TM

There is, however, no guarantee that the course of the conversation will provide

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the occasion for any particular mentionable to 'come up naturally'.

This being the case, it would appear that an important virtue for a closing
structure designed for this kind of topical structure would involve the provision

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 for placement of hitherto unmentioned mentionables. The terminal exchange by
itself makes no such provision. By exploiting the close organization resource of
adjacency pairs, it provides for an immediate (i.e ., next turn) closing of the
conversation. That this close-ordering technique for terminating not exclude the
possibility of inserting unmentioned mentionables can be achieved by placement
restrictions on the first part of terminal exchanges, for example, by requiring
'advance note' or some form of foreshadowing.

Issues to consider

Sacks and Schegloff say that adjacency pairs always play a part in the
beginning and ending of conversations. Why is this necessary? Can you
think of any situations in which this is not the case? What kind of effect is
produced? Do people perform openings and closing differently in
situations other than face-to-face communication (for example, text
messaging or telephone conversations)?

According to Sacks and Schegloff, closing sequences are designed the way
they are in order to help participants manage topics in conversations
(that is, to make sure neither of the parties wishes to introduce a new
topic). What role do adjacency sequences that occur at the beginnings of
conversations have in helping people to mange topics? Which person --
the initiator of the conversation or the responder -- is usually the person
who introduces the topic in face-to-face communication? Is this the same
in other kinds of interaction like instant messaging?

TM

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 D6 FRAMES IN INTERACTION

In the following classic article by Deborah Tannen and her collaborator Cynthia
Wallat, the authors give a clear an accessible definition of interactive frames and
the theoretical basis for this concept. They then go on to illustrate how
interactive frames operate in a medical examination between a pediatrician and
a child. As you read, play attention to the strategies the doctor uses to shift
frames from playing with the child to explaining the childs condition to the
mother, and how the doctor and the childs mother negotiate conflicting frames.

Interactive frames and knowledge schemas in interaction: examples
from a medical examination/interview

Deborah Tannen and Cynthia Wallat (reprinted from. Social Psychology Quarterly
50 (2), 1987: 205-16)

Interactive frames

The interactive notion of frame refers to a definition of what is going on in
interaction, without which no utterance (or movement or gesture) could be
interpreted. To use Bateson's classic example, a monkey needs to know whether
a bite from another monkey is intended within the frame of play or the frame of
fighting. People are continually confronted with the same interpretative task. In
order to comprehend any utterance, a listener (and a speaker) must know within
which frame it is intended: for example, is this joking? Is it fighting? Something
intended as a joke but interpreted as an insult (it could of course be both) can
trigger a fight.

Goffman (1974) sketched the theoretical foundations of frame analysis in the
work of William James, Alfred Schutz and Harold Garfinkel to investigate the
socially constructed nature of reality. Building on their work, as well as that of
linguistic philosophers John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Goffman developed
a complex system of terms and concepts to illustrate how people use multiple
frameworks to make sense of events even as they construct those events.
Exploring in more detail the linguistic basis of such frameworks, Goffman (1981)
introduced the term "footing" to describe how, at the same time that participants
frame events, they negotiate the interpersonal relationships, or "alignments,"
that constitute those events. TM

The interactive notion of frame, then, refers to a sense of what activity is
being engaged in, how speakers mean what they say. As Ortega y Gas'set (1959:

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3), a student of Heidegger, puts it, "Before understanding any concrete
statement, it is necessary to perceive clearly 'what it is all about' in this
statement and 'what game is being played.' Since this sense is gleaned from the

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 way participants behave in interaction, frames emerge in and are constituted by
verbal and nonverbal interaction.

*

One author (Tannen) was talking to a friend on the telephone, when he suddenly
yelled, "YOU STOP THAT!" She knew from the way he uttered this command that
it was addressed to a dog and not her. She remarked on the fact that when he
addressed the dog, he spoke in something approximating a southern accent. The
friend explained that this was because the dog had learned to respond to
commands in that accent, and, to give another example, he illustrated the way
he plays with the dog: "I say, 'GO GIT THAT BALLI'" Hearing this, the dog began
running about the room looking for something to fetch. The dog recognized the
frame "play" in the tone of the command; he could not, however, understand the
words that identified an outer frame, referring to playing with the dog," and
mistook the reference for a literal invitation to play.

This example illustrates, as well, that people (and dogs) identify frames in
interaction by association with linguistic and paralinguistic cues - the way words
are uttered - in addition to what they say. That is, the way the speaker uttered
"You stop that!" was associated with the frame "disciplining a pet" rather than
"chatting with a friend." Tannen drew on her familiarity with the use of linguistic
cues to signal frames when she identified her friend's interjection "You stop
that!" as addressed to a dog, not her. But she also drew on the knowledge that
her friend was taking care of someone's dog. This was part of her knowledge
schema about her friend. Had her schema included the information that he had a
small child and was allergic to dogs, she might have interpreted the same
linguistic cues as signaling the related frame, "disciplining a misbehaving child."
Furthermore, her expectations about how any speaker might express orders or
emotions, i.e. frame such expressions, were brought to bear in this instance in
conjunction with her expectations about how this particular friend is likely to
speak to her, to a dog and to a child; that is, a schema for this friend's personal
style. Thus frames and schemas interacted in her comprehension of the specific
utterance.

Interactive frames in the pediatric examination

Linguistic registers

A key element in framing is the use of identifiable linguistic registers. Register, as
Ferguson (1985) defines it, is simply "variation conditioned by use,"
conventionalized lexical, syntactic and prosodic choices deemed appropriate TMfor
the setting and audience .... In addressing the child, the pediatrician uses
"motherese": a teasing register characterized by exaggerated shifts in pitch,
marked prosody (long pauses followed by bursts of vocalization), and drawn out

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vowel sounds, accompanied by smiling.

For example, while examining Jody's ears with an ophthalmoscope (ear light),

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 the pediatrician pretends to be looking for various creatures, and Jody responds
with delighted laughter:

In stark contrast to this intonationally exaggerated register, the pediatrician uses
a markedly flat intonation to give a running account of the findings of her
examination, addressed to no present party, but designed for the benefit of
pediatric residents who might later view the video-tape in the teaching facility.
We call this "reporting register." For example, looking in Jody's throat, the doctor
says, with only slight stumbling:

Doctor: Her canals are are fine, they're open, urn her tympanic membrane
was thin, and light.

Finally, in addressing the mother, the pediatrician uses conventional
conversational register, as for example:

Doctor: As you know, the important thing is that she does have difficulty
with the use of her muscles.

Register shifting

Throughout the examination the doctor moves among these registers.
Sometimes she shifts from one to another in very short spaces of time, as in the
following example in which she moves smoothly from teasing the child while
examining her throat, to reporting her findings, to explaining to the mother what
she is looking for and how this relates to the mother's expressed concern with
the child's breathing at night.

TM

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The pediatrician's shifts from one register to another are sometimes abrupt (for
example, when she turns to the child and begins teasing) and sometimes gradual
(for example, her reporting register in ''high arched palate" begins to fade into
conversational register with ''but there's no cleft," and come to rest firmly in
conversational register with "what we'd want to look for ... "). In the following
example, she shifts from entertaining Jody to reporting findings and back to
managing Jody in a teasing tone:

TM

Frame shifting

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Although register shifting is one way of accomplishing frame shifts, it is not the
only way. Frames are more complex than register. Whereas each audience is

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 associated with an identifiable register, the pediatrician shifts footings with each
audience. In other words, she not only talks differently to the mother, the child
and the future video audience, but she also deals with each of these audiences in
different ways, depending upon the frame in which she is operating.
The three most important frames in this interaction are the social encounter,
examination of the child and a related outer frame of its videotaping, and
consultation with the mother. Each of the three frames entails addressing each of
the three audiences in different ways. For example, the social encounter requires
that the doctor entertain the child, establish rapport with the mother and ignore
the video camera and crew. The examination frame requires that she ignore the
mother, make sure the video crew is ready and then ignore them, examine the
child, and explain what she is doing for the future video audience of pediatric
residents.

The consultation frame requires that she talk to the mother and ignore the crew
and the child - or, rather, keep the child "on hold," to use Goffman's term, while
she answers the mother's questions. These frames are balanced nonverbally as
well as verbally. Thus the pediatrician keeps one arm outstretched to rest her
hand on the child while she turns away to talk to the mother, palpably keeping
the child "on hold."

Juggling frames

Often these frames must be served simultaneously, such as when the
pediatrician entertains the child and examines her at the same time, as seen in
the example where she looks in her ear and teases Jody that she is looking for a
monkey. The pediatrician's reporting register reveals what she was actually
looking at (Jody's ear canals and tympanic membrane). But balancing frames is
an extra cognitive burden, as seen when the doctor accidentally mixes the
vocabulary of her diagnostic report into her teasing while examining Jody's
stomach:

TM

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The pediatrician says the last line, "Is your spleen palpable over there?" in the
same teasing register she was using for peanut butter and jelly, and Jody
responds with the same delighted giggling "No" with which she responded to the
teasing questions about peanut butter and jelly. The power of the paralinguistic
cues with which the doctor signals the frame "teasing" is greater than that of the
words spoken, which in this case leak out of the examination frame into the
teasing register.

In other words, for the pediatrician, each interactive frame, that is, each
identifiable activity that she is engaged in within the interaction, entails her
establishing a distinct footing with respect to the other participants.

The interactive production of frames

Our analysis focuses on the pediatrician's speech because our goal is to show
that the mismatch of schemas triggers the frame switches which make this
interaction burdensome for her. Similar analyses could be performed for any
participant in any interaction. Furthermore, all participants in any interaction
collaborate in the negotiation of all frames operative within that interaction.
Thus, the mother and child collaborate in the negotiation of frames which are
seen in the pediatrician's speech and behavior.

For example, consider the examination frame as evidence in the pediatrician's
running report of her procedures and findings for the benefit of the video
audience.

Although the mother interrupts with questions at many points in the
examination, she does not do so when the pediatrician is reporting her findings
in what we have called reporting register. Her silence contributes to the
maintenance of this frame. Furthermore, on the three of seventeen occasions TMof
reporting register when the mother does offer a contribution, she does so in
keeping with the physician's style: Her utterances have a comparable clipped
style.

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The homonymy of behaviors

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 Activities which appear the same on the surface can have very different
meanings and consequences for the participants if they are understood as
associated with different frames. For example, the pediatrician examines various
parts of the child's body in accordance with what she describes at the start as a
"standard pediatric evaluation." At times she asks the mother for information
relevant to the child's condition, still adhering to the sequence of foci of attention
prescribed by the pediatric evaluation. At one point, the mother asks about a skin
condition behind the child's right ear, causing the doctor to examine that part of
Jody's body. What on the surface appears to be the same activity - examining the
child - is really very different. In the first case the doctor is adhering to a preset
sequence of procedures in the examination, and in the second she is interrupting
that sequence to focus on something else, following which she will have to
recover her place in the standard sequence.

Conflicting frames

Each frame entails ways of behaving that potentially conflict with the demands of
other frames. For example, consulting with the mother entails not only
interrupting the examination sequence but also taking extra time to answer her
questions, and this means that the child will get more restless and more difficult
to manage as the examination proceeds. Reporting findings to the video audience
may upset the mother, necessitating more explanation in the consultation frame.
Perhaps that is the reason the pediatrician frequently explains to the mother
what she is doing and finding and why.

Another example will illustrate that the demands associated with the
consultation frame can conflict with those of the examination frame, and that
these frames and associated demands are seen in linguistic evidence, in this case
by contrasting the pediatrician's discourse to the mother in the examination
setting with her report to the staff of the Child Development Center about the
same problem. Having recently learned that Jody has an arteriovenous
malformation in her brain, the mother asks the doctor during the examination
how dangerous this condition is. The doctor responds in a way that balances the
demands of several frames:

TM

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The mother's question invoked the consultation frame, requiring the doctor to
give the mother the information based on her medical knowledge, plus take into
account the effect on the mother of the information that the child's life IS in
danger. However, the considerable time that would normally be required for
such a task is limited because of the conflicting demands of the examination
frame: the child is "on hold" for the exam to proceed. (Notice that it is admirable
sensitivity of this doctor that makes her aware of the needs of both frames.
According to this mother, many doctors have informed her in matter-of-fact
tones of potentially devastating information about her child's condition, without
showing any sign of awareness that such information will have emotional impact
on the parent. In our terms, such doctors acknowledge only one frame -
examination - in order to avoid the demands of conflicting frames - consultation
and social encounter. Observing the burden on this pediatrician, who
successfully balances the demands of multiple frames, makes it easy to
understand why others might avoid this.)

The pediatrician blunts the effect of the information she imparts by using
circumlocutions and repetitions; pausing and hesitating; and minimizing the
significant danger of the arteriovenous malformation by using the word "only"
("only danger"), by using the conditional tense ("that would be the danger"), and
by stressing what sounds positive, that they're not going to get worse. She
further creates a reassuring effect by smiling, nodding and using a soothing tone
of voice.

In reviewing the Video-tape with us several years after the taping, the
pediatrician was surprised to see that she had expressed the prognosis in tTM his
way-- and furthermore that the mother seemed to be reassured by what was in
fact distressing information. The reason she did so, we suggest, is that she was
responding to the immediate and conflicting demands of the two frames she was

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operating in: consulting with the mother in the context of the examination.

Evidence that this doctor indeed felt great concern for the seriousness of the

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 child's condition is seen in her report to the staff regarding the same issue:

Here the pediatrician speaks faster, with fluency and without hesitation or
circumlocution. Her tone of voice conveys a sense of urgency and grave concern.
Whereas the construction used with the mother, "only danger," seemed to
minimize the danger, the listing construction used with the staff ("sudden death,
intracranial hemorrhage"), which actually refers to a single possible event, gives
the impression that even more dangers are present than those listed.

Thus the demands on the pediatrician associated with consultation with the
mother; those associated with examining the child and reporting her findings to
the video audience; and those associated with managing the interaction as a
social encounter are potentially in conflict and result in competing demands on
the doctor's cognitive and social capacities.

Issues to consider

The different frames the doctor uses with the young patient and with her
mother also involve different face strategies of independence and
involvement. What do you think the relationship between framing
strategies and face strategies is? How do they work together in
interactions? How does this relate to Goffmans concept of footing?

The way we interpret frames depends crucially on our knowledge
schema for different situations. How do the knowledge schema the
participants in the interaction described have about a medical
consultations affect how they produce and interpret contextualization
cues? Can you think of a situation in which you or someone you know
approached a situation with an incomplete or faulty knowledge schema?
What were the consequences?

TM
At one point in this interaction the doctor mixes a formal medical register
(Is your spleen palpable over there?) with a teasing frame, and the child
reacts as if this is part of the game. The authors use this as an example of

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how non-verbal contextualization cues can sometimes be so powerful as
to override the actual content of an utterance. Why do you think this is?
Can you think of any examples of this from your own experience?

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Sometimes we have to manage the demands of two or more frames at one
time. In this interaction, for example, the doctor has to manage
communicating medical information to both the mother and the students
watching the video and, at the same time, manage her young patient. In
what way are the demands of these three different frames incompatible?
What kinds of miscommunication can potentially arise from such
situations?

TM

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 D7 THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION

The two readings that follow come from two classic volumes on the ethnography
of communication: Directions in Sociolinguistics, edited by John Gumperz and Dell
Hymes, and The Ethnography of Communication by Muriel Saville-Troike. In the
first excerpt, Hymes lays out the distinction among speech situations, speech
events and speech acts. In the second excerpt, Muriel Saville-Troike discusses the
concept of communicative competence. One important point she makes is that
since we are all members of multiple speech communities, we all must obtain
multiple competences and sometimes negotiate among them, something that is
particularly true for second language learners.

A.

Speech Situations, Speech Events and Speech Acts

Dell Hymes (reprinted from Directions in sociolinguistics, John J. Gumperz and Dell
Hymes (eds.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 52-65)


Speech situation

Within a community one readily detects many situations associated with (or
marked by the absence of) speech. Such contexts of situation will often be
naturally described as ceremonies, fights, hunts, meals, lovemaking, and the like.
It would not be profitable to convert such situations en masse into parts of a
sociolinguistic description by the simple expedient of relabeling them in terms of
speech. (Notice that the distinctions made with regard to speech community are
not identical with the concepts of a general communicative approach, which
must note the differential range of communication by speech, film, art object,
music.) Such situations may enter as contexts into the statement of rules of
speaking as aspects of setting (or of genre). In contrast to speech events, they are
not in themselves governed by such rules, or one set of such rules throughout. A
hunt, e.g., may comprise both verbal and nonverbal events, and the verbal events
may be of more than one type.

In a sociolinguistic description, then, it is necessary to deal with activities which
are in some recognizable way bounded or integral. From the standpoint of
general social description they may be registered as ceremonies, fishing trips,
and the like; from particular standpoints they may be regarded as political,
esthetic, etc., situations, which serve as contexts for the manifestation of political,
TM
esthetic, etc., activity. From the sociolinguistic standpoint they may be regarded
as speech situations.

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Speech event

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 The term speech event will be restricted to activities, or aspects of activities, that
are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech. An event may
consist of a single speech act, but will often comprise several. Just as an
occurrence of a noun may at the same time be the whole of a noun phrase and
the whole of a sentence (e.g., Fire!), so a speech act may be the whole of a
speech event, and of a speech situation (say, a rite consisting of a single prayer,
itself a single invocation). More often, however, one will find a difference in
magnitude: a party (speech situation), a conversation during the party (speech
event), a joke within the conversation (speech act). It is of speech events and
speech acts that one writes formal rules for their occurrence and characteristics.
Notice that the same type of speech act may recur in different types of speech
event, and the same type of speech event in different contexts of situation. Thus,
a joke (speech act) may be embedded in a private conversation, a lecture, a
formal introduction. A private conversation may occur in the context of a party, a
memorial service, a pause in changing sides in a tennis match.

Speech act

The speech act is the minimal term of the set just discussed, as the remarks on
speech events have indicated. It represents a level distinct from the sentence,
and not identifiable with any single portion of other levels of grammar, nor with
segments of any particular size defined in terms of other levels of grammar. That
an utterance has the status of a command may depend upon a conventional
formula (I hereby order you to leave this building), intonation (Go! vs. Go?),
position in a conversational exchange [Hello as initiating greeting or as
response (perhaps used when answering the telephone)], or the social
relationship obtaining between the two parties (as when an utterance that is in
the form of a polite question is in effect a command when made by a superior to
a subordinate). The level of speech acts mediates immediately between the usual
levels of grammar and the rest of a speech event or situation in that it implicates
both linguistic form and social norms.

To some extent speech acts may be analyzable by extensions of syntactic and
semantic structure. It seems certain, however, that much, if not most, of the
knowledge that speakers share as to the status of utterances as acts is immediate
and abstract, depending upon an autonomous system of signals from both the
various levels of grammar and social settings. To attempt to depict speech acts
entirely by postulating an additional segment of underlying grammatical
structure (e.g., I hereby X you to . . .) is cumbersome and counterintuitive.
(Consider the case in which Do you think I might have that last bit of tea? is to
be taken as a command.)

An autonomous level of speech acts is in fact implicated by that logic of linguistic
TM
levels according to which the ambiguity of the shooting of the blacks was
terrible and the commonality of topping Erv is almost impossible and its

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almost impossible to top Erv together requires a further level of structure at
which the former has two different structures, the latter one. The relation
between sentence forms and their status as speech acts is of the same kind. A
sentence interrogative in form may be now a request, now a command, now a

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 statement; a request may be manifested by a sentence that is now interrogative,
now declarative, now imperative in form.

Discourse may be viewed in terms of acts both syntagmatically and
paradigmatically; i.e., both as a sequence of speech acts and in terms of classes of
speech acts among which choice has been made at given points.


Issues to consider

.
The distinction between speech events and speech situations is
potentially ambiguous. Hymes says that what distinguishes speech events
from speech situations is that speech situations are not governed by one
set of rules throughout. What distinguishes a speech event from a speech
situation, then, is very much dependent on the distinctions that members
of a speech community themselves make regarding things like setting and
genre. What are some ways an analyst can go about determining the
boundaries of a speech event?

Hymess understanding of speech acts differs somewhat from the
formulation we are familiar with from Austin (see Section B5). Rather
than understanding speech acts in relation to felicity conditions, Hymes
suggests that we interpret speech acts in terms of the speech events in
which they are embedded, just as we interpret speech events in terms of
the broader speech situations in which they are embedded. What
differences does this reveal between the way the ethnography of
communication and other approaches to spoken discourse such as
pragmatics and conversation analysis understand communication?

B.
Communicative Competence

Muriel Saville-Troike, (reprinted from The ethnography of communication, Oxford:

Blackwell, 2003, pp. 18-22)

Hymes (1966) observed that speakers who could produce any and all of the
grammatical sentences of a language (per Chomskys 1965 definition of
linguistic competence) would be institutionalized if they indiscriminately went
about trying to do so without consideration of the appropriate contexts of TM use.
Communicative competence involves knowing not only the language code but also
what to say to whom, and how to say it appropriately in any given situation.
Further, it involves the social and cultural knowledge speakers are presumed to

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have which enables them to use and interpret linguistic forms. Hymes (1974,
1987) augmented Chomskys notion of linguistic competence (knowledge of
systematic potential, or whether or not an utterance is a possible grammatical
structure in a language) with knowledge of appropriateness (whether and to

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 what extent something is suitable), occurrence (whether and to what extent
something is done), and feasibility (whether and to what extent something is
possible under particular circumstances). The concept of communicative
competence (and its encompassing congener, social competence) is one of the
most powerful organizing tools to emerge in the social sciences in recent years.

Communicative competence extends to both knowledge and expectation of who
may or may not speak in certain settings, when to speak and when to remain
silent, to whom one may speak, how one may talk to persons of different statuses
and roles, what nonverbal behaviors are appropriate in various contexts, what
the routines for turn-taking are in conversation, how to ask for and give
information, how to request, how to offer or decline assistance or cooperation,
how to give commands, how to enforce discipline, and the like in short,
everything involving the use of language and other communicative modalities in
particular social settings.

Clear cross-cultural differences can and do produce conflicts or inhibit
communication. For example, certain American Indian groups are accustomed
to waiting several minutes in silence before responding to a question or taking a
turn in conversation, while the native English speakers they may be talking to
have very short time frames for responses or conversational turn-taking, and
find long silences embarrassing . . .

The concept of communicative competence must be embedded in the notion of
cultural competence, or the total set of knowledge and skills which speakers
bring into a situation. This view is consonant with a semiotic approach which
defines culture as meaning, and views all ethnographers (not just ethnographers
of communication) as dealing with symbols (e.g. Douglas 1970; Geertz 1973).
The systems of culture are patterns of symbols, and language is only one of the
symbolic systems in this network. Interpreting the meaning of linguistic
behavior requires knowing the meaning in which it is embedded.

Ultimately all aspects of culture are relevant to communication, but those that
have the most direct bearing on communicative forms and processes are the
social and institutional structure, the values and attitudes held about language
and ways of speaking, the network of conceptual categories which results from
experiences, and the ways knowledge and skills (including language) are
transmitted from one generation to the next and to new members of the group.
Shared cultural knowledge is essential to explain the shared presuppositions and
judgments of truth value which are the essential undergirdings of language
structures, as well as of contextually appropriate usage and interpretation.

While referential meaning may be ascribed to many of the elements in the TM
linguistic code in a static manner, situated meaning must be accounted for as an
emergent and dynamic process. Interaction requires the perception, selection,

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and interpretation of salient features of the code used in actual communicative
situations, integrating these with other cultural knowledge and skills, and
implementing appropriate strategies for achieving communicative goals.

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 The phonology, grammar, and lexicon which are the target of traditional
linguistic description constitute only a part of the elements in the code used for
communication. Also included are the paralinguistic and nonverbal phenomena
which have conventional meaning in each speech community, and knowledge of
the full range of variants in all elements which are available for transmitting
social, as well as referential, information. Ability to discriminate between those
variants which serve as markers of social categories or carry other meaning and
those which are insignificant, and knowledge of what the meaning of a variant is
in a particular situation, are all components of communicative competence.

The verbal code may be transmitted on oral, written, or manual (signed)
channels. The relative load carried on each channel depends on its functional
distribution in a particular speech community, and thus they are of differential
importance in the linguistic repertoire of any individual or society. Full
participation in a deaf speech community requires ability to interpret language
on the manual channel but not the oral, for instance; a speech community with a
primarily oral tradition may not require interpretation of writing; and a speech
community which relegates much information flow to the written channel will
require literacy skills for full participation. Thus, the traditional linguistic
description which focuses only on the oral channel will be too narrow to account
for communicative competence in most societies.

Although it may cause some terminological confusion, references to ways of
speaking and ethnography of speaking should be understood as usually including
a much broader range of communicative behavior than merely speech.
The typical descriptive focus on oral production has tended to treat language as a
unidirectional phenomenon. In considering the nature and scope of
communicative competence, it is useful to distinguish between receptive and
productive dimensions (Troike 1970); only shared receptive competence is
necessary for successful communication. Knowledge of rules for appropriate
communicative behavior entails understanding a wide range of language forms,
for instance, but not necessarily the ability to produce them. Members of the
same community may understand varieties of a language which differ according
to the social class, region, sex, age, and occupation of the speaker, but only a few
talented mimics will be able to speak them all. In multilingual speech
communities, members often share receptive competence in more than one
language but vary greatly in their relative ability to speak one or the other.

The following outline summarizes the broad range of shared knowledge that is
involved in appropriate communication. From the ethnographers perspective,
this inventory also indicates the range of linguistic, interactional, and cultural
phenomena which must ultimately be accounted for in an adequate description
and explanation of communicative competence (see also Gumperz 1984; HTM ymes
1987; Duranti 1988).

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1 Linguistic knowledge

(a) Verbal elements
(b) Nonverbal elements

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 (c) Patterns of elements in particular speech events
(d) Range of possible variants (in all elements and their organization)
(e) Meaning of variants in particular situations

2 Interaction skills

(a) Perception of salient features in communicative situations
(b) Selection and interpretation of forms appropriate to specific situations, roles,
and relationships (rules for the use of speech)
(c) Discourse organization and processes
(d) Norms of interaction and interpretation
(e) Strategies for achieving goals

3 Cultural knowledge

(a) Social structure (status, power, speaking rights)
(b) Values and attitudes
(c) Cognitive maps/schemata
(d) Enculturation processes (transmission of knowledge and skills)

Communicative competence within the ethnography of communication usually
refers to the communicative knowledge and skills shared by a speech
community, but these (like all aspects of culture) reside variably in its individual
members. The shared yet individual nature of competence reflects the nature of
language itself, as expressed by von Humboldt (1836):

While languages are in the ambiguous sense of the word . . . creations of
nations, they still remain personal and individual creations of individuals.
This follows because they can be produced in each individual, yet only in
such a manner that each individual assumes a priori the comprehension
of all people and that all people, furthermore, satisfy such expectation.

Considering communicative competence at an individual level, we must
additionally recognize that any one speaker is not infrequently a member of
more than one speech community often to different degrees. For individuals
who are members of multiple speech communities, which one or ones they
orient themselves to at any given moment which set of social and
communicative rules they use is reflected not only in which segment of their
linguistic knowledge they select, but which interaction skills they utilize, and
which aspects of their cultural knowledge they activate. The competence of non-
native speakers of a language usually differs significantly from the competence of
native speakers; the specific content of what an individual needs to know and the
skills he or she needs to have depend on the social context in which he or sTM
he is
or will be using the language and the purposes he or she will have for doing so.

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This further emphasizes why the notion of an ideal speaker-listener, in a
completely homogeneous speech-community (Chomsky 1965: 3) is inadequate
for ethnographic purposes. Also, multilingual speakers communicative
competence includes knowledge of rules for the appropriate choice of language

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 and for switching between languages, given a particular social context and
communicative intent, as well as for the intralingual shifting among styles and
registers which is common to the competence of all speakers. An extension has
been made to intercultural communicative competence, which requires an
additional level of metacompetence involving explicit awareness of differential
usages and ability to adapt communicative strategies to a variety of cultural
situations (Kim 1991). Liu (2001) further extends the construct to adaptive
cultural competence as a goal for second language learners, which also
encompasses social identity negotiation skills and culture-sensitivity
knowledge. He argues that such a higher level competence is needed for
appropriate and effective social participation of non-native speakers who are in
roles of international students or immigres.

Accounting for the nature of communicative competence ultimately requires
going beyond a concern with Language (capital L) or a language. It requires a
focus on the ways in which people do use language . . . (Hymes 1993: 13).
Problems arise when individual competence is judged in relation to a presumed
ideal monolingual speech community, or assessed with tests given in a limited
subset of situations which do not represent the true range of an individuals
verbal ability (Hymes 1979). The problems are particularly serious ones when
such invalid judgments result in some form of social or economic discrimination
against the individuals, such as unequal or inappropriate educational treatment
or job placement. Awareness of the complex nature of communicative
competence and the potential negative consequences of misjudgments is leading
to major changes in procedures and instruments for language assessment, but no
simple solutions are forthcoming (see Philips 1983; Milroy 1987; Byram 1997).

Issues to consider

Saville-Troike offers a model for thinking about communicative
competence which is slightly different from Hymess SPEAKING model,
one in which competence is divided into 1) linguistic knowledge, 2)
interaction skills, and 3) cultural knowledge, with each category
containing a number of components. Which of these components
correspond to the components in the SPEAKING model and which do not?
To what extent do you think these additional components enhance the
model?

Saville-Troike makes the distinction between receptive competence and
productive competence. How do these different kinds of competence
determine the degree of participation one can have in a speech event? Are
there speech events in which only receptive competence is sufficient TMfor
most participants? Are their speech events in which both kinds of
competence are required for participation?

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At the end of this excerpt Saville-Troike discusses the implications of the
idea of communicative competence for language learning and language
assessment. How do you think using the idea of communicative

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 competence as opposed to the narrower notion of linguistic competence
would affect the way you might go about testing the language proficiency
of an individual?

TM

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 D8 DISCOURSE AND ACTION

In this section you will read an excerpt from Mediated Discourse: The nexus of
practice, the book in which Ron Scollon first articulated his theory of mediated
discourse analysis. As you read, notice how he distinguishes his method from
other approaches to discourse analysis. At the same time, take note of the
similarities this method has with other methods discussed in this book and how
Scollon incorporates principles and tools from those methods into his model.

Discourse and action: a cup of coffee

Ron Scollon (reprinted from Mediated discourse: The nexus of practice. London:
Routledge 2001, pp. 1-8)

One morning recently in San Diego, California I had a cup of coffee at the
international chain coffee shop, Starbucks. After a short time in the queue I
ordered a tall latte and another drink for my friend. I paid for the drinks and
then waited a few minutes while the drinks were made and then delivered to me.
We took the drinks and sat down to drink them and have a conversation. As
linguists and perhaps only linguists do, in and among the other topics of
conversation we talked about what was printed on the cup.

Mediated discourse analysis is a framework for looking at such actions with two
questions in mind: What is the action going on here? and How does Discourse
figure into these actions? In a sense there is nothing very new or different about
mediated discourse analysis in that it is a remedial position that seeks to develop
a theoretical remedy for discourse analysis that operates without reference to
social actions on the one hand and social analysis that operates without
reference to discourse on the other. Virtually all of the theoretical elements have
been proposed and developed in the work of others. In this, mediated discourse
analysis takes the position that social action and Discourse are inextricably
linked on the one hand (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999) but that on the other
hand these links are sometimes not at all direct or obvious, and therefore in need
of more careful theorization.

In having this cup of coffee I could say there is just a single actionhaving a cup
of coffee as is implied in the common invitation, Lets go have a cup of coffee. Or
I could say there is a very complex and nested set of actionsqueuing, ordering,
purchasing, receiving the order, selecting a table, drinking coffee, conversing,
busing our trash and the rest. Likewise, I could say there is just one discourse
TM
herea conversation among friends. Or I could say there are many complex
Discourses with rampant intertextualities and interdiscursivitiesinternational

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neo-capitalist marketing of coffee, service encounter talk, linguistic conference
talk, family talk and the rest. Mediated discourse analysis is a position which
seeks to keep all of this complexity alive in our analyses without presupposing

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 which actions and which Discourses are the relevant ones in any particular case
under study.

As a way to at least temporarily narrow the scope of my analysis here, I want to
focus on the coffee cup. It can be called the primary mediational means by which
the coffee has been produced as something transferable, delivered to me, and
ultimately consumed. Without the cup there is no <having a cup of coffee> in the
literal sense. Throughout all the other actions which take place, the cup figures
as the material line that holds this all together. From the point of view of an
analysis of mediated action (Wertsch 1998), then, we would want to consider the
cupa paper one in this caseabsolutely central to both the narrowly viewed
actions of delivery or drinking and to the more broadly viewed actions of
consumer purchasing/marketing or of <having a cup of coffee> as a
conversational genre.

If we come to this social interaction from the point of view of discourse analysis,
and if we set aside for the moment all of the complexities of service encounter
talk and of casual conversation between friends, we still find that the cup itself
(with its protective sleeve) is an impressive semiotic complex of at least seven
different Discourses (Gee 1999).

Commercial branding: There is a world-wide recognizable logo which
appears twice on the cup and once on the cardboard protective sleeve.

Legal: The logo is marked as a registered property () and the text on
the sleeve is marked as copyrighted (). A patent number is also given.
In addition, there is a warning that the contents are extremely hot which
derives from a famous lawsuit against another international chain where
a customer had held a paper cup of their coffee between his legs while
driving and been uncomfortably scorched.

E-commerce: A website is given where the consumer can learn more,
though it does not indicate what we might learn about.

Consumer correctness: An extended text tells us that the company cares
for those who grow its coffee and gives a telephone number where the
consumer can call to make a donation to CARE on behalf of plantation
workers in Indonesia.

Environmental correctness: We are told that the sleeve is made of 60%
recycled fiber and that it uses less material than would a second paper
cup. The color scheme is in natural cardboard brown with green lettering
which are widely associated with environmental friendliness. TM

Service information: There is a roster of possibilities (Decaf, Shots,

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Syrup, Milk, Custom, and Drink) printed and superimposed is the
handwritten L (for latte).

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 Manufacturing information: Under the cup around the inside rim is the
information about the cup itself, its size, and product labeling and
number.

On the one hand we have a fairly clear and mundane social actionhaving a cup
of coffee in a coffee shopand a semiotic complex of Discourses which are also,
at least now at the beginning of this century, rather mundane. We have an array
of analytical positions from which we can analyze this action from seeing it as
participating in a bit of micro-social interaction to seeing it as participating in the
world-wide consumer practices of neo-capitalism. At the same time we have an
array of analytical positions from which we can analyze the Discourses
represented in these texts printed on this coffee cup. The problem that mediated
discourse analysis is trying to engage is how we are to work out a way to
understand the relationships among the actionsdrinking the cup of coffee
and the Discourses. Ethnographic observation leads us to believe that, on the
whole except for the odd linguist, the coffee is drunk without much attention
being focused on this impressive discursive array on the cup. Correspondingly,
the literature has many analyses of such Discourses in public places from the
products of the news industry through to the broader popular culture industry
which make scant reference at all to the actual social situations in which these
Discourses are engaged in social action. Mediated discourse analysis is an
attempt to theorize a way in which we can link the Discourse of commercial
branding, for example, with the practice of drinking a cup of coffee in
conversation without giving either undue weight to the action without reference
to the Discourse or to the Discourse without reference to the actions within
which it is appropriated.

A few central concepts

A mediated discourse analysis gives central importance to five concepts:
Mediated action
Site of engagement
Mediational means
Practice
Nexus of practice
Mediated action: The unit of analysis of a mediated discourse analysis is the
mediated action (not the Discourse or text or genre). That is, the focus is on
social actors as they are acting because these are the moments in social life when
the Discourses in which we are interested are instantiated in the social world as
social action, not simply as material objects. We use the phrase mediated action
to highlight the unresolvable dialectic between action and the material means TM
which mediate all social action (Wertsch 1998). That is, we take the position that
action is materially grounded in persons and objects and that it is unproductive
to work with purely abstracted conceptual systems of representation.

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Participation in the world-wide consumer society requires at some point the
transfer of coins and cups, speaking and drinking. Conversely stated, this
transfer of coins and cups and speaking and drinking inevitably entail

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 participating in the consumer society. There is no action without participating in
such Discourses; no such Discourses without concrete, material actions.

A site of engagement: A mediated action occurs in a social space which I have
elsewhere called a site of engagement (Scollon 1998, 1999). This is the real-
time window that is opened through an intersection of social practices and
mediational means (cultural tools) that make that action the focal point of
attention of the relevant participants. The idea of the site of engagement takes
from practice/activity theory (as well as from interactional sociolinguistics) the
insistence on the real-time, irreversible, and unfinalizable nature of social action.

A mediated action is not a class of actions but a unique moment in history. Its
interpretation is located within the social practices which are linked in that
unique moment. The cup of coffee/coffee conversation in San Diego is
theoretically taken as unique and unfolding in that moment and bears only a
loose, indirect, and highly problematical relationship with another cup of coffee
at a Starbucks in San Luis Obispo among the same participants a week later if
for no other reason that the first is part of the history of the second.

Mediational means: A mediated action is carried out through material objects in
the world (including the materiality of the social actorstheir bodies, dress,
movements) in dialectical interaction with structures of the habitus. We take
these mediational means to always be multiple in any single action, to carry with
them historical afffordances and constraints, and to be inherently polyvocal,
intertextual, and interdiscursive. Further, these multiple mediational means are
organized in a variety of ways, either in hierarchical structures of activities or in
relatively expectable relations of salience or importance.

While I have focused on the cup in this sketch, this cup of coffee has also equally
entailed the physical spaces of the coffee shop, the coins and bills exchanged, the
servers, the counters, the coffee machines, the tables and chairs, the other
customers of the shop, the San Diego sunshinea significant materiality of that
particular actionand our own habitus, latte for me, chai latte for my friend.
The polyvocality, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity of the cup has been noted
above. To this we add the Southern California dcor which sets this particular
shop in its place on earth and departs so radically from the same companys
shops in Washington, DC, Beijing, and London.

Practice and social structure: For this mediated action to take place in this way
there is a necessary intersection of social practices and mediational means which
in themselves reproduce social groups, histories, and identities. A mediated
discourse analysis takes it that a mediated action is only interpretable within
practices. From this point of view having a cup of coffee is viewed as a different
TM
action in a Starbucks, in a cafeteria, and at home. The difference lies both in
the practices (how the order is made, for example) and in the mediational means

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(including the range from the espresso machines to the dcor of the spaces in
which the action is taken). That is to say, a mediated discourse analysis does not
neutralize these practices and social structures as context, but seeks to keep
them alive in our interpretations of mediated actions.

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Nexus of practice: Mediated discourse analysis takes a tight or narrow view of
social practice as social practicesordering, purchasing, handing and
receivingand so then sees these as practices (as count nouns, not as a mass
noun). These practices are linked to other practices discursive and non-
discursive over time to form nexus of practice. So we might loosely at least want
to talk about an early 21st Century American designer coffee shop nexus of
practice which would provisionally include such things as pricing practices
(high), ordering practices (the distinctions between caffe latte, caf au lait,
regular coffee with milk, cappuchino), drinking practices (alone with
newspapers, in conversation with friends), discursive practices (being able to
answer to whole or skim?, knowing that tall means the smallest cup on sale or
that for here means in a porcelain cup rather than a paper one), physical
spacing practices (that the queuing place and delivery place are different) and
the rest.

The concept of the nexus of practice works more usefully than the concept of the
community of practice which was the earlier framing (Scollon 1998) in that it is
rather loosely structured and structured over time. That is, a nexus of practice,
like practices themselves is formed one mediated action at a time and is always
unfinalized (and unfinalizable). The concept of the nexus of practice is
unbounded (unlike the more problematical community of practice) and takes
into account that at least most practices (ordering, purchasing, handing and
receiving) can be linked variably to different practices in different sites of
engagement and among different participants. From this point of view, the
practice of handing an object to another person may be linked to practices which
constitute the action of purchasing in a coffee shop, it may be linked to practices
which constitute the action of giving a gift to a friend on arriving at a birthday
party, or even to handing a bit of change to a panhandler on the street. Mediated
discourse analysis takes the position that It is the constellation of linked
practices which make for the uniqueness of the site of engagement and the
identities thus produced, not necessarily the specific practices and actions
themselves.

This mediated action of having a cup of coffee and the concurrent and
dialogically chained prior and subsequent mediated actions could be analyzed
with a great deal more care than I have been able to do here. My purpose has
been simply to make these five points:

The mediated action (within a dialogical chain of such social actions) is
the focus of mediated discourse analysis.
The focus is on real-time, irreversible, one-time-only actions rather
than objectivized, categorical analyses of types of action or discourses TM
and texts.
An action is understood as taking place within a site of engagement

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which is the real-time window opened through an intersection of
social practices and mediational means.
The mediational means are multiple in any case and inevitably carry
histories and social structures with them.

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 A mediated action produces and reproduces social identities and
social structures within a nexus of practice.

Theoretical principles

It is only with some trepidation that I suggest that mediated discourse analysis is
a theory as that word tends to evoke emotional responses only surpassed
perhaps by patriotism or plagiarism. Nevertheless, I believe it is important to
seek to make ones claims clear and then proceed with the business of
discovering what is wrong with them. Here I will articulate three principles
which organize mediated discourse theory. The three main principles are the
principles of social action, communication, and history. I would argue that the
second two are simply tautological or definitional extensions of the first
principle as are the corollaries. I make no claim that these principles are unique
to mediated discourse; indeed, it is my hope that the only originality, if there is
originality at all in these ideas, is in the degree of explicitness of the underlying
principles I am trying to achieve.

PRINCIPLE ONE: The principle of social action: Discourse is best conceived as a
matter of social actions, not systems of representation or thought or values.

COROLLARY ONE: The ecological unit of analysis
The proper unit of analysis for a theory of social action is, tautologically,
the social action, or as I prefer to phrase it, the mediated action; that is,
the person or persons in the moment of taking an action along with the
mediational means which are used by them form the ecological unit of
analysis, the unit of analysis in which the phenomenon exists, changes,
and develops through time (Bateson 1972).

COROLLARY TWO: Practice: All social action is based in tacit, normally
non-conscious actions.

COROLLARY THREE: Habitus: The basis of social action is the habitus
(Bourdieu 1977, 1990) or the historical-body (Nishida 1958): An
individuals accumulated experience of social actions.

COROLLARY FOUR: Positioning (identity claims): All social actions occur
within a nexus of practice which makes implicit or explicit claims to the
social groups and positions of all participantsspeakers, hearers, and
those talked about or in front of.

COROLLARY FIVE: Socialization: Because all social actions position TM the
participants, all communications have the effect of socialization to nexus
of practice.

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COROLLARY SIX: Othering: Because of the principle of socialization, all
communications have the simultaneous effect of producing others who

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 are identified by not being members of the relevant community of
practice.

PRINCIPLE TWO: The principle of communication: The meaning of the term
social in the phrase social action implies a common or shared system of
meaning. To be social an action must be communicated.

COROLLARY ONE: Mediational means: The production of shared
meanings is mediated by a very wide range of mediational means or
cultural tools such as language, gesture, material objects, and institutions
which are carriers of their sociocultural histories.

COROLLARY TWO: Organization of mediational means: The multiple
mediational means involved in a mediated action are related to each other
in complex ways.

PRINCIPLE THREE: The principle of history: Social means historical in the
sense that shared meaning derives from common history or common past.

COROLLARY ONE: Interdiscursivity: Because of the principle of history,
all communication is positioned within multiple, overlapping, and even
conflicting discourses.

COROLLARY TWO: Intertextuality: Because of the principle of history, all
communications (particular utterances) borrow from other discourses
and texts and are, in turn, used in later discourses.

COROLLARY THREE: Dialogicality (or conversational or practical
inference): Because of the principle of history, all communications
respond to prior communications and anticipate following
communications.

Issues to consider

Scollon says that the main task of mediated discourse analysis is finding
out a way to understand the relationship between the actions that we
take and larger capital D Discourses without giving either undue weight
to the action without reference to the Discourse or to the Discourse
without reference to the actions within which it is appropriated. What
are some of the challenges involved in this task? How is the way
mediated discourse analysis goes about this task different from the way
critical discourse analysis (see Sections A4, B4, C4 and D4) does? TM

Accoding to Scollon, a nexus of practice occurs when a number of
practices are linked to other practices in predictable ways. The example

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he gives is early 21st Century American designer coffee shop nexus of
practice. How does this definition of nexus of practice compare to Gees

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 definitions of cultural models and capital D Discourses and with
Swaless definition of discourse communities?

Scollon notes that when we take social actions we inevitably make claims
about who we are, the communities to which we belong. He also notes
that these same actions have the effect of producing others who are
constructed as not members of the relevant nexus of proactice. How is the
way mediated discourse analysis approaches issues of social identity
similar to and different from the way interactional sociolinguistics and
critical discourse analysis do?

In Section D4, Fairclough quoted Kristiva as saying that intertextuality
involves the insertion of history (society) into a text and of this text into
history. How is the relationship between discourse and history explained
in mediated discourse analysis?

TM

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 D9 TWO PERSPECTIVES ON MULTIMODALITY

The excerpts reprinted in this section represent to two broad approaches to
multimodality which were introduced in Section A9. The first is from Gunther
Kress and Theo van Leeuwans classic, Reading images: The grammar of visual
design. In this excerpt the authors make an argument that visual design, like
language, constitutes an organized system of meaningful choices which can be
analyzed with reference to linguistic theories. At the same time, they warn
against adopting the same concepts used to analyze language to analyze other
modes, which necessarily involve different kinds of resources from making
meaning. They then go on to explain the grammar of visual design in terms of
Hallidays tripartite model of meaning: ideational meaning, interpersonal
meaning, and textual menaing.

In the second excerpt, Sigrid Norris makes an argument for moving beyond a
view of interaction that focuses primarily on spoken language, insisting that
other modes like gesture, gaze, posture and the layout of furniture are just as
important, and sometimes more important, than speech. She then goes on to
explain how principles from mediated discourse analysis (see Section D8) can
help to organize the multimodal analysis of interactions.
As you read through these excerpts, consider not just how the two approaches
differ from each other, but also how they appropriate and build upon concepts
from other approaches to discourse that have been discussed in this book.

A.
Reading Images

Gunther Kress, and Theo van Leeuwen (reprinted from Reading Images: The
grammar of visual design 2nd Edition. London: Routledge 2006, pp. 17-20, 41-43)

In this book we take a fresh look at the question of the visual. We want to treat
forms of communication employing images as seriously as linguistic forms have
been. We have come to this position because of the now overwhelming evidence
of the importance of visual communication, and the now problematic absence of
the means for talking and thinking about what is actually communicated by
images and by visual design. In doing so, we have to move away from the
position which Roland Barthes took in his 1964 essay Rhetoric of the image
(1977: 3251). In this essay (and elsewhere, as in the introduction to Elements of
semiology; Barthes, 1967a), he argued that the meaning of images (and of oTM ther
semiotic codes, like dress, food, etc.) is always related to and, in a sense,
dependent on, verbal text. By themselves, images are, he thought, too
polysemous, too open to a variety of possible meanings. To arrive at a definite

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meaning, language must come to the rescue. Visual meaning is too indefinite; it is
a floating chain of signifieds. Hence, Barthes said, in every society various
techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a
way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs; the linguistic message is one of

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 these techniques (1977: 39). He distinguished between an imagetext relation in
which the verbal text extends the meaning of the image, or vice versa, as is the
case, for example, with the speech balloons in comic strips, and an imagetext
relation in which the verbal text elaborates the image, or vice versa. In the
former case, which he called relay, new and different meanings are added to
complete the message. In the latter case, the same meanings are restated in a
different (e.g. more definite and precise) way, as is the case, for example, when a
caption identifies and/or interprets what is shown in a photograph. Of the two,
elaboration is dominant. Relay, said Barthes, is more rare. He distinguished two
types of elaboration, one in which the verbal text comes first, so that the image
forms an illustration of it, and one in which the image comes first, so that the text
forms a more definite and precise restatement or fixing of it (a relation he calls
anchorage).

Before approximately 1600 (the transition is, of course, very gradual), Barthes
argued, illustration was dominant. Images elaborated texts, more specifically
the founding texts of the culture mythology, the Bible, the holy writ of the
culture texts, therefore, with which viewers could be assumed to be familiar.
This relation, in which verbal texts formed a source of authority in society, and in
which images disseminated the dominant texts in a particular mode to particular
groups within society, gradually changed to one in which nature, rather than
discourse, became the source of authority. In the era of science, images, ever
more naturalistic, began to function as the book of nature, as windows on the
world, as observation, and verbal text served to identify and interpret, to load
the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination.

This position does explain elements of communication. Any one of the image
text relations Barthes describes may at times be dominant, although we feel that
today there is a move away from anchorage. Compare, for example, the classic
documentary film in which the viewer is first confronted with images of nature,
then with the authoritative voice of a narrator who identifies and interprets the
images, with the modern current affairs item, in which the viewer is first
confronted with the anchorpersons verbal discourse and, either simultaneously
or following on from the verbal introduction, with the images of nature that
illustrate, exemplify and authenticate the discourse. But Barthes account misses
an important point: the visual component of a text is an independently organized
and structured message, connected with the verbal text, but in no way
dependent on it and similarly the other way around.

One important difference between the account we develop in this book and that
of earlier semioticians is our use of work in linguistic theories and descriptions.
This is a difficult argument to make, but worth making clearly. We think that this
book would not have been possible without the achievements of linguistics, yet
TM
we do not, in the way some critics of our approach have suggested, see our
approach as a linguistic one. So what have we used from linguistics, and how

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have we used it? And, equally, what have we not used from linguistics? To start
with the latter question, we have not imported the theories and methodologies of
linguistics directly into the domain of the visual, as has been done by others
working in this field. For instance, we do not make a separation of syntax,

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 semantics and pragmatics in the domain of the visual; we do not look for (the
analogues of) sentences, clauses, nouns, verbs, and so on, in images. We take the
view that language and visual communication can both be used to realize the
same fundamental systems of meaning that constitute our cultures, but that
each does so by means of its own specific forms, does so differently, and
independently.

To give an example, the distinction between subjective and objective meanings
has played an important role in Western culture ever since the physical sciences
began to develop in the sixteenth century. This distinction can be realized (that
is, given concrete, material expression, hence made perceivable and
communicable) with linguistic as well as visual means. The terms subjective and
objective can therefore be applied to both: they belong to the meaning potential
of a culture and its society. But the way the distinction is realized in language is
quite different from the way it is realized in images. For example, in language an
idea can be realized subjectively by using a mental process verb like believe in
the first person (e.g. We believe that there is a grammar of images); or
objectively through the absence of such a form (e.g. There is a grammar of
images). Visual representation, too, can realize both subjectivity, through the
presence of a perspectival angle, and objectivity, through its absence. Mental
process clauses and nominalization are unique to language. Perspective is unique
to images. But the kinds of meaning expressed are from the same broad domain
in each case; and the forms, different as they are, were developed in the same
period, in response to the same cultural changes. Both language and visual
communication express meanings belonging to and structured by cultures in the
one society; the semiotic processes, though not the semiotic means, are broadly
similar; and this results in a considerable degree of congruence between the two.

At the same time, however, each medium has its own possibilities and limitations
of meaning. Not everything that can be realized in language can also be realized
by means of images, or vice versa. As well as a broad cultural congruence, there
is significant difference between the two (and other semiotic modes, of course).
In a language such as English one needs to use a verb in order to make a full
utterance (believe, is); and language has to use names to refer to whatever is to
be represented (a grammar of images, believe, we). But language does not have
or need angles of vision to achieve perspective, nor does it have or need spatial
dispositions of elements to achieve the meanings of syntactic relations: images
have and need both. The meaning potentials of the two modes are neither fully
conflated nor entirely opposed. We differ from those who see the meaning of
language as inherent in the forms and the meaning of images as derived from the
context, or the meanings of language as conscious and the meanings of images
as unconscious.
TM
To return to the first of our two questions What have we used from linguistics,
and how have we used it? perhaps the most significant borrowing is our overall

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approach, an attitude which assumes that, as a resource for representation,
images, like language, will display regularities, which can be made the subject of
relatively formal description. We call this a grammar to draw attention to
culturally produced regularity. More specifically, we have borrowed semiotic

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 orientations, features which we taken to be general to all human meaning-
making, irrespective of mode. For instance, we think that the distinction between
objectivity and subjectivity is a general cultural/semiotic issue which can be
realized linguistically as well as visually, though differently so, as we have said.
Or, as another instance, we have taken Michael Hallidays social semiotic
approach to language as a model, as a source for thinking about general social
and semiotic processes, rather than as a mine for categories to apply in the
description of images. His model with its three functions is a starting point for
our account of images, not because the model works well for language (which it
does, to an extent), but because it works well as a source for thinking about all
modes of representation.
*

A Social Semiotic Theory of Communication

In order to function as a full system of communication, the visual, like all
semiotic modes, has to serve several representational and communicational
requirements. We have adopted the theoretical notion of metafunction from the
work of Michael Halliday for this purpose. The three metafunctions which he
posits are the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual. In the form in which
we gloss them here they apply to all semiotic modes, and are not specific to
speech or writing.

The ideational metafunction

Any semiotic mode has to be able to represent aspects of the world as it is
experienced by humans. In other words, it has to be able to represent objects and
their relations in a world outside the representational system. That world may of
course be, and most frequently is, already semiotically represented. In doing so,
semiotic modes offer an array of choices, of different ways in which objects, and
their relations to other objects and to processes, can be represented. Two objects
may be represented as involved in a process of interaction which could be
visually realized by vectors:

But objects can also related in other ways, for instance in terms of a TM
classification. They would be connected, not by a vector but, for instance, by a
tree structure:

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The interpersonal metafunction

Any semiotic mode has to be able to project the relations between the producer
of a (complex) sign, and the receiver/reproducer of that sign. That is, any mode
has to be able to represent a particular social relation between the producer, the
viewer and the object represented.

As in the case of the ideational metafunction, modes offer an array of choices for
representing different interpersonal relations, some of which will be favoured
in one form of visual representation (say, in the naturalistic image), others in
another (say, in the diagram). A depicted person may be shown as addressing
viewers directly, by looking at the camera. This conveys a sense of interaction
between the depicted person and the viewer. But a depicted person may also be
shown as turned away from the viewer, and this conveys the absence of a sense
of interaction. It allows the viewer to scrutinize the represented characters as
though they were specimens in a display case.

The textual metafunction

Any semiotic mode has to have the capacity to form texts, complexes of signs
which cohere both internally with each other and externally with the context in
and for which they were produced. Here, too, visual grammar makes a range of
resources available: different compositional arrangements to allow the
realization of different textual meanings. In figure D9.1, for example, the text is
on the left and the picture on the right. Changing the layout (figure D9.1) would
completely alter the relation between written text and image and the meaning of
the whole. The image, rather than the written text, would now serve as point of
departure, as anchor for the message.

TM

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Figure D9.1

Figure D9.2

Issues to consider

In the beginning of this excerpt Kress and van Leeuwen give a historical
account of the relationship between text and image beginning with the
15th century. How do you think the importance of images in
communication has changed over time, especially in relation to media like
the Internet and mobile phones? Do you think images function differently
in communication than they did before?

TM
Kress and van Leeuwen say Both language and visual communication
express meanings belonging to and structured by cultures in the one
society. Does this mean that the visual grammar of different cultures is

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likely to be as different at their languages? To what degree does visual
communication transcend different cultures in ways that language
cannot?

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Look at figures D9.1 and D9.2. Which arrangement of text and image
seems more natural to you? Can you translate the differences between
these two arrangements into language?

B.

Sigrid Norris (reprinted from Analyzing multimodal interaction: A methodological

framework. London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 1-3, 9-13)

Multimodal Interaction Analysis

All interactions are multimodal. Imagine, for example, a simple two-person
interaction, a conversation with a friend. During this interaction, you are aware
of your friend 's spoken language, so that you hear the verbal choices, the
content, the prosody, and the pitch. You are also aware of the way that your
friend is standing or sitting, the way that your friend is nodding or leaning back
or forward; you are aware of your friend 's facial expression, and clothing, just as
you are aware of the environment in which this interaction takes place. If there is
music playing in the background, even though you are not focusing on the music,
you are aware of it. All of these elements play a part in this conversation. You
may react to the words that your friend is speaking as much as you may react to
your friend's facial expression or the posture that your friend is taking up
towards you. You may speak quickly or slowly, depending on the music playing
in the background or the given environment that the interaction takes place in.
Intuitively we know that we draw on all of these communicative channels or
modes when interacting with others. We also know that we are aware of many
things that surround us while we interact with others. Let us keep thinking about
a conversation. No matter where it may take place, you are certainly aware
whether other people are present in close proximity. Thus, if your conversation
takes place at a table in a cafeteria, you are aware of others talking, eating, or
passing by your table. You may not take much notice of these other people,
because you are focused on your conversation, but you are aware of them
nevertheless.

Interactional Meaning

Generally it is assumed that we can communicate best through our use of TM
language. Language seems to have the most informative content, which can
easily be employed without a need for other channels. We may speak on the
phone, Write emails, or go to chat-rooms. In each case, we use language, either

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spoken or written, to communicate.

But when thinking about TV or the Internet, it is clear that we also communicate

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 through images. Often, viewing an image may carry more. We may even feel that
the image has more "reality" to it than a written description of the same image
would have. This realization questions the notion that the process of
communicating is dependent upon language. Just as moving images or still
photos can communicate meaning to the viewer, nonverbal channels such as
gesture, posture, or the distance between people can - and do - carry meaning in
any face-to-face interaction.

All movements, all noises, and all material objects carry interactional
meaning as soon as they are perceived by a person. Previously, language has
been viewed as constituting the central channel in interaction, and nonverbal
channels have been viewed as being subordinated to it. While much valuable
work on the interplay between the verbal and nonverbal has been established, I
believe that the view which unquestionably positions language at the center
limits our understanding of the complexity of interaction.

Therefore, I will step away from the notion that language always plays the
central role in interaction, without denying that it often does. Language,
as Kress et al. (200 I) have noted, is only one mode among many, which may or
may not take a central role at any given moment in an interaction. In this view,
gesture, gaze, or head movement may be subordinated to the verbal exchanges
going on as has been shown in much research.

However, gesture, gaze, and head movement also may take the superior position
in a given interaction, while language may be subordinated or absent altogether.
Alternatively, sometimes many communicative channels play an integral part in
a given interaction, without one channel being more important than another.

While we all intuitively know that people in interaction draw on a multiplicity of
communicative modes, and that people in interaction are aware of much more
than just what they are focused upon, an analysis of such multimodal interaction
brings with it many challenges.

Structure and Materiality

One challenge for the analysis of multimodal interaction is that the different
communicative modes of language, gesture, gaze, and material objects are
structured in significantly different ways. While spoken language is sequentially
structured, gesture is globally synthetically structured, which means that we can
not simply add one gesture on to another gesture to make a more complex one.
In language, we can add a prefix to a word, making the word more complex; or
we can add subordinate clauses to a main clause, making the sentence more TM
complex. With gestures, this is not possible, since gestures that are linked to
language inform about global content or intensity. Gaze, however, may be
sequentially structured, and during conversation it often is. But, during other

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interactions, gaze can be quite random. For example, when you walk through the
woods with a friend, your gaze may wander randomly, focusing on a tree, a rock,
or nothing at all. Then there are other communicative modes, which are

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 structured even more differently.

As we will see, furniture is a mode, and when thinking about it, we find a
functional structure. Chairs are usually located around a table, or a reading lamp
is located next to an easy chair. Thus, different modes of communication are
structured in very different ways.

Another challenge for the analysis of multimodal interaction is the fact that
different communicative modes possess different materiality. For example,
spoken language is neither visible nor enduring, but it does have audible
materiality. Gesture, however, has visible materiality but is also quite fleeting.
The mode of print has more visible materiality and is also enduring; and the
mode of layout, thinking about furniture, for example, has highly visible
materiality and is extensively enduring.

*

Heuristic Units

The first step to a multimodal analysis of interaction is a basic understanding of
an array of communicative modes. modes such as proxemics, posture, head
movement, gesture, gaze, spoken language, layout, print, music, to name several,
are essentially systems of representation. A system of representation or mode of
communication is a semiotic system with rules and regularities attached to it
(Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001). I like to call these systems of representation
communicative modes when I emphasize their interactional communicative
function.

A communicative mode is never a bounded or static unit, but always
and only a heuristic unit. The term "heuristic" highlights the plainly explanatory
function , and also accentuates the constant tension and contradiction between
the system of representation and the real-time interaction among social actors.
A system of representation - a writing system, for example - is usually thought of
as a given system that exists in and by itself once it is developed.

While such a system changes over time, we can describe the system in the form
of dictionaries and grammars, showing the rules and regularities that exist.
Taking this thought further, we could describe systems of representation like
gesture, gaze, layout, etc. in a similar way to a written language, by developing
certain in dictionaries and grammars of these communicative modes.

Communicative Modes in Interaction TM

When observing an interaction and trying to discern all of the communicative
modes that the individuals are utilizing, we soon notice that this is a rather

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overwhelming task. People move their bodies, hands, arms, and heads, and while
the observer may try to understand the content of what is being spoken, they
have already missed many important messages which each speaker is sending -
intentionally or not - and the other speaker is reacting to through other modes.

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 Yet, a multimodal interactional analysis is not as impossible as one may think.
First, the analyst needs to become skilled at distinguishing one communicative
mode from others. Then the analyst is ready to investigate how modes play
together in interaction.

When working with real-time interaction, we discover that there is constant
tension and contradiction between the system of representation and the event.
Individuals in interaction draw on systems of representation while at the same
time constructing, adopting, and changing those systems through their actions.
In turn, all actions that individuals perform are mediated by the systems of
representation that they draw on.

Unit of Analysis

As I mentioned in the introduction, the differing structures and materiality of
modes were challenges that needed to be overcome, as an integrative
multimodal approach required a single unit of analysis that allowed for the
communicative modes to be structurally and materially different. In multimodal
interaction al analysis, the mediated action is the unit of analysis, and since every
action is mediated, I will simply speak of the action as the unit of analysis. The
action as unit of analysis, however, is still a complicated issue, because there are
smaller (lower-level) and larger (higher-level) actions. Take, for example, a
person uttering the words "good morning." This is an intonation unit the unit
that discourse analysts rely on. But this intonation unit can also be defined as a n
action, and more specifically, as a lower-level action. Now, take a meeting among
three friends, which can be called a conversation, a moment in time, or a social
encounter. This meeting can also be called an action, however, and more
specifically, a higher-level action. This use of action as a unit of analysis may
seem confusing at first sight. However, let us think about the specific example of
a meeting among three friends - to illustrate the usefulness of this unit of
analysis. The meeting is taken to be the higher-level action. This higher-level
action is bracketed by an opening and a closing of the meeting and is made up of
a multiplicity of chain d lower-level actions. All intonation units that an
individual strings together become a chain of lower-level actions. All gesture
units that an individual performs become a chain of lower-level actions. All
postural shifts that an individual completes become a chain of lower-level
actions. All gaze shifts that an individual performs become a chain of lower-level
actions, and so on. Consequently, all higher-level actions are made up of multiple
chains of lower-level actions.

The chains of lower-level actions are easily understood when talking about
embodied communicative modes like gaze, gesture, or spoken language. But TM
disembodied modes can play just as important a role in interaction as do the
embodied modes.

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Modes like print - a magazine that participants are reading or that is just lying on
a table for anyone to see; or layout - the furniture in a room, pictures hung on a
wall, or a busy street with signs, buildings, and walkways, are disembodied

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 modes. These modes can also be analyzed by using the unit of analysis, the
(mediated) action. However, here the unit of analysis is the frozen action. Frozen
actions are usually higher-level actions which were performed by an individual
or a group of people at an earlier time than the real-time moment of the
interaction that is being analyzed.

These actions are frozen in the material objects themselves and are therefore
evident. When we see a magazine lying on a table, we know that somebody has
purchased the magazine and placed it on the table. Thus, the chains of lower-
level actions that somebody had to perform in order for the magazine to be
present on the table are perceptible by the mere presence of the magazine itself.

The same is true for furniture, pictures on walls, houses in cities, or a CD playing.
Material objects or disembodied modes, which we are concerned with here
because individuals draw upon them in interaction, necessarily entail higher-
level actions (which are made up of chained lower-level actions).

We can think of lower-level actions as the actions that are f1uiclJy performed by
an individual in interaction. Each lower-level action is mediated by a system of
representation (which includes body parts such as the lips, etc. for spoken
language; or hands, arms, and fingers for manual gestures). Higher-level actions
develop from a sum of fluidly performed chains of lower-level actions, so that the
higher-level actions are also fluid and develop in real-time. Every higher-level
action is bracketed by social openings and closings that are at least in part
ritualizcd. When the three friends get together for their meeting, the higher-level
action of that meeting is opened up by the physical coming together or the
friends and by ritualized greetings. Similarly, this overarching higher-level action
will be ended by ritualized greetings and a parting or the individuals. Embedded
within such a higher-level action, we find other higher-level actions such as a
conversation between two or the three members, or another conversation
among all three of them . Besides conversations, we may also find higher-level
actions which develop from a sum of other lower-level actions in which there is
little or no talk involved, like the higher-level action or consuming food and/or
drink.

While lower-level and higher-level actions are fluidly constructed in interaction,
frozen actions are higher-level actions, which are entailed in an object or a
disembodied mode. To understand this concept, we can think about ice. Similarly
to the freezing of water, actions are frozen in the material objects present in
interaction.

Issues to consider TM

Norris talks about how the materiality of a mode affects the way it
structures meaning and action. What implications does this have when

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people wish to translates meanings from one mode to another? Can you
give some examples?

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 A communicative mode, says Norris, is never a bounded or static unit,
but always and only a heuristic unit. What does she mean by this? What
are the advantages of keeping the concept of communicative mode
flexible and contingent?

TM

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 D10 FINDING DISCOURSES WITH CORPUS-ASSISTED
ANALYSIS

The following excerpt is from a study by Paul Baker and Tony McEnery on the
portrayal of refugees in British newspapers and texts from the Office of the
United Nations High Commission on Refugees. The excerpt included here deals
only with the newspaper texts, which the authors demonstrate portray refugees
as packages, invaders and pests. Baker and McEnery make the argument in this
article that lexical choice plays an important role in the construction of
Discourses and the expression of ideology.

A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in

UN and newspaper texts

Paul Baker and Tony McEnery (reprinted from Journal of Language and Politics 4
(2), 2005, pp. 197226)

Discourses

A discourse can be conceptualised as a system of statements which constructs
an object (Parker 1992: 5). Discourse is further categorised by Burr (1995: 48)
as:

a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements
and so on that in some way together produce a particular version of
events... Surrounding any one object, event, person etc., there may be a
variety of different discourses, each with a different story to tell about the
world, a different way of representing it to the world.

Discourses are not valid descriptions of peoples beliefs or opinions, and they
cannot be taken as representing an inner, essential aspect of identity such as
personality or attitude. Instead, they are connected to practices and structures
that are lived out in society from day to day.

One way that researchers can be confident in their claims about the existence of
discourses is to highlight patterns of association how lexical items tend to co-
occur are built up over large amounts of text and are often unavailable to
intuition or conscious awareness. They can convey messages implicitly and even
TM
be at odds with an overt statement. (Hunston 2002: 109). In order to explore
how refugees are constructed in news discourse we chose to build and use
corpora of news texts.

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Data and Method

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 The British newspaper texts (referred to hereafter as the News Corpus) were
collected from an internet archive called Newsbank, the criteria for selecting
news articles being that the article had to contain the words refugee(s) or the
phrases asylum seeker(s) and had to have been published in 2003.

Results

Concordances (tables showing all of the examples of a search term in the context
that it appears in) of the words refugee (53 occurrences) and refugees (87) were
carried out on the 76,205 word News Corpus. In addition, concordance searches
of the words they and them uncovered anaphoric references to refugees which
were also included in the analysis. In order to uncover linguistic patterns
surrounding the search words, the concordances were sorted alphabetically
using the words directly to the left and right of the search terms, and the
descriptive clauses and phrases which were used to refer to the target words
were then grouped into categories of similarity.

Quantification

An initial analysis reveals that refugees are commonly described in terms of
where they are from (e.g. Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, Kosovo,
Algeria etc.), where they currently are (France, Sangatte, the Belgian border etc.)
or where they are going. A smaller set of terms describe refugees in terms of the
circumstances which created them, although these words are vague (eco nomic,
political, war, wartime).

One of the other most common ways of describing refugees in the News Corpus
is by providing a pre-modifying quantification (Table 2). This is often given as a
rough estimate by reporters e.g. tens of thousands or up to 100 ref- ugees.
Sometimes numbers are described as growing: more and more refugees.
TM

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 Table 2: Quantification of Refugees in News Corpus

In some cases, these types of quantification suggest that the volume of refugees
is troublesome. In the example below, the reference to the large number (a mob,
up to 100) of refugees in the article serves to enhance their danger.

BRITISH journalist Robert Fisk was attacked and beaten up by a mob of Af-
ghan refugees in Pakistan yesterday... He suffered head, face and hand inju-
ries after being pelted with stones by up to 100 refugees.

Many of the attempts to quantify refugees suggest an underlying discourse
concerning alarm over their growing numbers.

Mr Endres said Kabul risked straining under the weight of refugees in
transit.

The camp... is currently filled far beyond capacity. Because of the upheaval
in Afghanistan, which is swelling the number of refugees daily...

In the first example, refugees are likened to a dangerous mass or heavy load
(note the use of the words straining and weight) while in the second, refugees
TM
are constructed as liquid (filled beyond capacity, swelling). Such a feature may not
be peculiar to British newspaper texts; Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 59) note that

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the description of immigrants and the effects of immigration in terms of negative
metaphors is a common feature of German and Austrian discourses. They list
nineteen different types of metaphors, including plants, fire, blood, disease and

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 food. We look at some of the metaphors in the News and UNHCR Corpora in the
following sections.

Movement

A set of words which describe refugees are concerned with their movement
(Table 3), often using verb phrases which suggest a range of evaluative
responses which construct refugees as victims or a collective group undergoing
suffer- ing: e.g. fleeing refugees, refugees trudge aimlessly, hunched against a
biting wind, roads heave with refugees. As with the filled far beyond capacity
example noted earlier, a number of movement metaphors liken refugees to
water in some way: swelling the numbers of refugees, the flood of refugees,
refugees are streaming home, refugees are streaming back to their homes,
overflowing refugee camps.

Streaming collocates (or significantly often co-occurs) in the BNC with the words
tears, blood, sweat, water and rain and often occurs in a negative context, e.g.
tears streaming down his face. Overflowing collocates strongly in the BNC with
leaking and water. Swelling (462 occurrences in the BNC) collocates most
strongly with words which suggest medical contexts: e.g. redness, bruising, pain,
chest. However, swell which occurs more often (566 times in the BNC) collocates
with words connected to water: waves, Atlantic, ocean, sea, water. The phrase
flood of collocates most strongly with refugees in the BNC, with tears and
immigrants occurring second and third respectively. Again, flood is connected to
water and to tragedy.

In a sense then, refugees are constructed as a natural disaster like a flood, which
is difficult to control as it has no sense of its own agency. Again, this is not
peculiar to British newspaper texts; similar water metaphors were also found by
Refaie (2001) in an analysis of Austrian newspaper articles about Kurdish
asylum seekers in Italy.

Phrases such as trudge aimlessly help to construct refugees as having no real
understanding of their situation or what motivates them. Consider the phrase
desultory groups of refugees (Table 3, line 8). Desultory is a fairly rare word in
general British English, occurring only 103 times in the BNC, and only collocating
with two lexical words, fashion and conversation. Again, the word implies lack of
motivation or pattern: e.g. Because the session is informal it is liable to fragment
into a desultory conversation with no clear direction.



TM

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 Table 3: Movement of refugees in the News Corpus

The movement of refugees is constructed as an elemental force which is difficult
to predict and has no sense of control. If refugees are likened to the movement of
water, then they are dehumanised and become something that requires control
in order to prevent disaster to others (e.g. non-refugees).

As well as describing the movement of refugees as being almost random, a
number of phrases focus on movement in terms of large quantities: e.g. roads
heave with refugees, packed with refugees. The word packed collocates with
words suggesting quantity or places containing large numbers of people in TM the
BNC tightly, densely, closely, tight, crowd, courtroom, cinemas, while the verb
lemma heave7 collocates with words which suggest weight bulk, broad, deep,

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great as well as the expression of emotional burdens, e.g. Uncle Wafter heaved a
sigh and slumped back in the chair, his hand covering his eyes (ex- ample taken
from the BNC).

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 Closely related to the notion of packed refugees are another set of move- ment
descriptors connected to refugees, associated with the transportation of objects
and goods. Refugees are delivered, transported, carried, trafficked and smuggled.
For the locals, no end to the problem is in sight as more and more refugees are
delivered to northern France by traffickers.

The highest collocate of deliver in the BNC is goods. Goods also occurs as a strong
collocate of transport, along with cattle, supplies and materials. Carry oc- curs
much more frequently and has a wider range of collocates, many of which are
object-based nouns: placards, firearms, suitcases, torches. Finally, smuggle
collocates most strongly with the following lexical words: cocaine, heroin, drugs,
drug and arms while traffic collocates with narcotics, drugs and arms.

Therefore, as well as being described as an elemental force that cannot be
reasoned with (water), refugees are also constructed in terms of metaphors and
connotational verbs which construct them as transported goods, particularly
illegal substances again, as a token of their dehumanisation.

Tragedy

Another discourse of refugees is to construct them as tragic (see Table 4). This
involves using phrases such as the plight of, despair of and tragedy of. Plight
collocates in the BNC with groups such as homeless, refugees, blacks, women,
unemployed and children all identities that could be constructed as power-
less in different ways. However, three of the four strongest collocates of plight in
the BNC are highlighting, highlight and highlighted, in sentences such as It is 10
days since our shock issue highlighting the plight of the starving in Somalia.
Plight is therefore often connected to attempts to heighten awareness about a
group which is oppressed or unfortunate in some way.

Other words which suggest tragedy in connection with the refugee data are
scrounge, beg, tedious, tottering, solace and stricken. Refugees are reported as
starving, dying while locked in containers, seeking solace in religion, queuing for
food and being attacked by soldiers.








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 Table 4:Tragic circumstances of refugees in the News Corpus

Official attempts to help

Related to the presentation of refugees as tragic victims is another set of col-
locates which are more concerned with external efforts to help them (Table 5).
These involve phrases such as refugee action, refugee service, refugee agency, de-
scribe official bodies involved in running organisations, and discuss attempts to
enable refugees to integrate into society, particularly by learning the lan- guage
of their host country or by going to school. The grammatical pattern X for
refugees is a relatively common example of this helping discourse trace. In
addition, terms such as shelter, help, concern, mercy and rescue contribute to the
construction of this discourse


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 Table 5: Official attempts to help in the News Corpus

Crime and nuisance

in East Timor; integrate into society. Action. Here, Belinda Beresford in agency.
children who were rescued from Service, said: If she went into Afg of
Bangladesh in 1971. and she wanted into homes all over the coun and orphans.
and the homeless. in Afghanistan. . Agencies are racing to provide bla on the role
of the peacekeeping forc camp. camp at Sangatte. However, they op , and
confronts violence and power

However, a less common discourse constructs refugees as being connected to
crime and as a nuisance (Table 6). In this case, their presence pushes down
house prices or causes a steep rise in petty crime. Such fears invoke a more
general discourse of capitalism, whereby refugees are seen as a threat to the








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 Table 6: Crime and nuisance in the News Corpus

capitalist way of life by reducing the value of property. As one woman is re-
ported as saying: they are a pest.

Refugee camps are also reported as hiding grounds for extremists or mili- tants,
and refugees are also involved in plans to enter countries illegally e.g. to
storm the channel tunnel. The use of storm as a verb suggests attempts to
conquer common collocates of the verb lemma storm in the BNC include
troops, castle, victory and army. In this sense, refugees are invaders.

A final, rare use of refugee in the News Corpus is more metaphorical, where it is
used to describe people who look like someone or something else:

Coming on like some refugee from the Ricky Lake Show, burly Fred spent
much of the programme successfully convincing Sandra that he thought the
first marriage had been annulled, and moaning to the camera that he
shouldnt be put in jail for falling in love.

Owen may look like a refugee from a Hovis ad, but as Sven-Goran Eriksson
said: Hes very cold when he gets a chance and hes very quick.
Last week I watched some do-it-yourself programme where a couple of
refu- gee presenters from the makeover toolbox showed you how to have a
kitsch Christmas.

These three cases are not from newspaper articles which are concerned wTM ith
actual refugees. Instead, the phrase (like) [determiner] refugee from... is used to
allude to a persons similarity to something else. However, this is a construc- tion
which contains an implicitly negative evaluation the fact that such people are

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described as refugees at all accesses an existing negative discourse of actual
refugees, but it also implies that they are not viewed as possessing the identity
they are supposed to have, possibly because they werent competent at it, or
because they look as if they should be something else. So Michael Owen (in the

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 second example) is viewed not so much as a footballer, but a refugee from a
Hovis ad(vert). Finally, the identity they are supposed to resemble is
constructed negatively so the phrase implies that the person isnt even
competent to perform a stigmatised identity properly, and instead is a refugee
from it.

Conclusion

The News Corpus is )particularly) concerned with the impact of refugees on the
UK rather than taking a global perspective. Attitudes are presented in (an)
ambivalent and complex way, with refugees constructed as tragic vic-tims, an
out-of-control mass, pests or potential invaders. Metaphors of water or packages
serve to dehumanise refugees further. The News Corpus also refers to official
attempts to help refugees, but this is simply one discourse type among many
which are present. The fact that the term refugee is used in metaphorical
constructions like some refugee from the Ricky Lake Show, reveals the negative
connotation embedded within the word.

Many of the linguistic strategies used to refer to refugees and asylum seekers
such as referring to them as an indistinguishable mass or vague quantity, using
metaphors, describing them as bogus or referring to unspecified fears serve
several purposes which are linked to the notion of racist discourse. As van Dijk
(1987: 58) describes, there are four topic classes for racist discourses: they are
different, they do not adapt, they are involved in negative acts and they threaten
our socio-economic interests. Hardt-Mautner (1995:179) points out, National
identity emerges very much as a relational concept, the construction of self
being heavily dependent on the construction of other. The racist constructions
of refugees and asylum seekers, therefore, not only construct a threat to the
status quo and national identity (which incidentally helps to sell newspapers),
they also help to construct national identity by articulating what it is not.

However, more encouraging aspects of the corpus data suggest a less preju diced
picture than earlier researchers have found when looking at newspaper data.
Stereotypes of refugees as criminal nuisances and constructions of asylum
seekers as bogus were still present in the corpora, yet they were relatively rare.

Discourses which focused on the problems encountered by refugees and asylum
seekers and/or attempts to help them were relatively more common, suggesting
that in 2003 at least, there was a growing awareness of the need for sensitivity
when discussing issues connected to immigration in the UK. As Law et al.
(1997:18) found in a recent study, about three quarters of news articles
concerned with race contained media frames TM

which seek to expose and criticise racist attitudes, statements, actions and
policies, which address the concerns of immigrant and minority ethnic

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groups and show their contribution to British society, and which embrace
an inclusive view of multi-cultural British identity.

241
 A study by Jessika terWal concluded that the British tabloid press no longer
seem to merit the overly racist tag that they were given by studies in the early
1980s. (2002: 407).

A corpus-based approach is therefore useful, in that it helps to give a wider view
of the range of possible ways of discussing refugees and asylum seekers. A more
qualitative approach to analysis may mean that saliency is perceived as more
important than frequency whereby texts which present shocking or extreme
positions are focussed on more than those which are more frequent, yet neutral.
While it is important to examine extreme cases, it is also useful to put them into
perspective alongside other cases. In addition, corpus data can help us to
establish which sorts of language strategies are most frequent or popular. For
example, the refugees as water metaphor was found to be much more frequent
than other metaphors, such as refugees as illegal packages or as invaders. Rather
than simply listing the metaphors which appear in the data then, we are able to
get a more accurate sense of which ones are naturalised, and which ones may be
particularly salient because they are so infrequent.

In addition, the corpus-based approach enables the researcher to arrive at a
more complete understanding of the meanings and functions of certain word
choices in texts about refugees and asylum seekers. The connotative use of
language in critical discourse analysis is one of the most fruitful areas of analysis
available to researchers and by looking at the collocational strength of lexical
items in a corpus of general language, we are given an objective sense of the
themes and associations that are embedded in words due to their contin- ual
pairing with other words. By exposing the hidden collocations of certain words,
we can explain that a certain word or phrase contains a hint of bias, but have not
been able to specify why.

Issues to consider

Baker and McEnery show how the cumulative patterning of lexical
features in a corpus of texts can be used to posit the existence of a
particular Discourse. Can think of features other than lexical choice that
might also contribute to the construction of Discourses. How might
corpus analysis assist in detecting these features?

Baker and McEnery combine a number of different analytical techniques,
both qualitative and quantitative, in their analysis. How does this
combination of techniques help to make their analysis more convincing?

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 FURTHER READING

Strand 1: What is discourse?

There are many good overviews of discourse analysis including Brown and Yule
(1983), Carter (1997), Paltridge (2006), and Widdowson (2007). Good edited
collections are Schiffrin et. al (2003) and Hyland and Paltridge (2011). Bhatia et
al. (2007) focuses on more recent developments in the field. Jaworski and
Coupland (2006) is a fine compilation of key readings. For an elaboration of the
three approaches to discourse, see Schiffrin (1994). For more on capital D
Discourses see Gee (2010).

Strand 2: Texts and texture

For a thorough treatment of cohesion and other aspects of texture, see Martin
(1992). Stoddard, (1991) is also a good introduction. Eggins (1994) provides a
more general overview of systemic functional linguistics. A classic compliation of
papers on coherence in discourse is Tannen (1984). Another important work on
the structure and comprehension of narrative are Labov and Waletzky (1967),
Kintsch (1977). Carrell (1984) discusses the effects of schema on second
language readers. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) provide another perspective on
discourse coherence. Liu and O'Halloran (2009) discusses cohesion from a
multimodal perspective.

Strand 3: Texts and their social functions

Apart from Bhatia (1993) and Swales (1990), Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) is
a good introduction to genre analysis. Johns (1997) and Swales (2004) focus
more on academic genres. Bhatia (2004) gives a more up-to-date treatment of
the field of genre analysis. See Christie and Martin (1997) for a systemic
functional view of genre. Bateman (2008) takes a multimodal approach to genre
analysis. Besides Blood (2000), Herring et al. (2004) is a good analysis of the
genre of the weblog.

Strand 4: Discourse and ideology

The Routledge English Language Introduction which focuses most on discourse TM
and ideology is Simpson and Mayr (2009) Language and power: A resource book
for students. A Routledge English Language Introduction which offers more

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information on aspects of grammar covered in this strand is Jackson (2002)
Grammar and vocabulary: A resource book for students. Hodge and Kress (1988)
and Fairclough (1992) are classic works in the critical analysis of discourse.
Good collections of papers on critical discourse analysis are Fairclough (1995)

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 and Wodak and Meyer (2001). Fairclough (2003) gives an excellent practical
introduction to the critical analysis of texts, and van Leeuwen (2008) provides a
more practice-based approach to critical discourse analysis.

Strand 5: Spoken discourse

The Routledge English Language Introduction which focuses most on spoken
discourse is Cutting (2007) Pragmatics and discourse: A resource book for
students. Coulthard (1992) is a classic edited collection on the analysis of spoken
language. Austins speech act theory was further developed by Searle (1966).
Good introductions to pragmatics include Mey (2001) and Verschueren (1999),
and good introductions to conversation analysis include Hutchby and Wooffitt
(2008), Schegloff (20007), and ten Have (2007). The lectures of Harvey Sacks are
collected in Sacks (1992). Drew and Heritage (1993) deals with talk in
institutional settings.

Strand 6: Strategic Interaction

The classic work on face strategies is Brown and Levinson (1987). A more recent
book on face and politeness is Watt (2003). For more information on framing in
interaction seen Tannen (1993). Tannen (2005) is a good overview of
conversational strategies. An excellent collection on discourse and identity from
an interactional sociolinguistic perspective is De Fina et al. (2006). A collection
dealing with speech styles and social languages is Auer (2007). For another
approach to conversational strategies, see the work of Harr and van
Langenhove (1999) on positioning theory. For studies on conversational
strategies in computer mediated communication see Morand and Ocker (2003).
Losh (2008) and Talamo and Ligorio (2001).

Strand 7: Context, culture and communication

Duranti and Goodwins (1992) edited collection provides multiple perspectives
on the problem of context. van Dijk (2008) examines context from a
sociocognitive perspective. A very accessible introduction to culture and
conversation is Agar (1993). Bauman and Sherzer (1989) presents an overview
of the principles and practices associated with the ethnography of
communication, and Philipsen (1975) is a good example of an application of this
method. For more information on ethnographic research methods see Agar TM
(1996) and Hammersley and Atkinson (1995).

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 Strand 8: Mediated discourse analysis

Wertsch (1993) provides a good introduction to the socio-cultural theory on
which mediated discourse analysis is based. The seminal texts on mediated
discourse analysis and nexus analysis are Scollon (2001) and Scollon and Scollon
(2004). Norris and Jones (2005) is a collection which shows the wide range
contexts to which mediated discourse analysis can be applied. It also contains a
clear explanation of the principles and terminology used in MDA. An alternate
approach to the analysis of computer-mediated discourse can be found in
Herring (2001).

Strand 9: Multimodal discourse analysis

Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) is a good theoretical introduction to multimodal
discourse analysis. OHalloran (2004) and Royce and Bowcher (2006) are good
collections of studies from a systemic functional perspective. The papers in
Jewitt (2009) present a more varied range of perspectives. Machin (2007) takes
a critical approach to multimodality, and Forceville and Urios-Aparisi present an
approach informed by cognitive linguistics. For more information on the
transcription of multimodal data see Baldry and Thibault (2005) and Norris
(2004).

Strand 10: Corpus-assisted discourse analysis

The Routledge resource book which focuses on corpus-based analysis is
McEnery and Xiao (2006) Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource
book. Stubbs (1996) is a well-known introductory text for corpus-based
linguistics. Other good introductions are Biber et al. (1998) and Hunston (2002).
Baker (2006) provides a clear overview of using corpora in discourse analysis. A
classic application of corpus-based methods to critical discourse analysis is
Orpin (2005).

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Malinowski, B. (1923). The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C. K. Ogden,
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Ortega y Gasset, J. (1959). The difficulty of reading. Diogenes 28, 1-17. (D6)
OToole, M. (1994) The language of displayed art. London: Leicester University. (A9)
Owen, M. (1983). Apologies and remedial interchanges: Study of language use in social
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Orpin, D. (2005). Corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis: Examining the
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reading)
Paltridge, B. (2006). Discourse analysis: An introduction. London, New York: Continuum.
(Further reading)
Parker, I. (1992). Discourse dynamics: Critical analysis for social and individual
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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (2010) The PETA Files, Lady Gagas meat
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http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2010/09/13/Lady-Gagas-Meat-
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Philips, S.U. (1983). An ethnographic approach to bilingual language proficiency
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Press Trust of India (2010) Lady Gaga's 'meat dress' voted most iconic outfit.
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dress-outfit-lady-gaga (C2)
Propp, V. (1986). Morphology of the folktale (L. Scott, Trans.) Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press. (B1)
Quinn, N. and Holland, D. (1987). Culture and cognition. In D. Holland and N. Quinn (Eds.)
Cultural models in language and thought (pp. 3-40). Cambridge: Cambridge
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Reddy, M. (1979). The conduit metaphor a case of conflict in our language about
language. In A. Ortony (Ed.) Metaphor and thought (pp. 384-324). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (D4)
Refaie, E. (2001). Metaphors we discriminate by: Naturalized themes in Austrian
newspaper articles about asylum seekers. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (3), 352
371. (D10)
Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and discrimination: Rhetorics of racism and
anti-Semitism. London: Routledge. (D10)
Rey, J. M. (2001) Changing gender roles in popular culture: Dialogue in Star Trek
episodes from 1966 to 1993, In D. Biber, and S. Conrad (Eds.). Variation in
English: Multi-dimensional studies (pp 138-156). London: Longman. (A10)
Royce, T.D. and Bowcher, W. (Eds.) (2006). New directions in the analysis of
multimodal discourse. London: Routledge. (Further reading)
Ruesch, J., and Bateson, G. (1968 [1951]). Communication: the social matrix of psychiatry.
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Rumelhart, D. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In D. Bobrow and A. Collins (Eds.),
Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science. New York:
Academic Press. (B2, D2)
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation, (G. Jefferson and E.A. Schegloff, Eds.). Oxford
and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. (Further reading)
Saville-Troike, M. (2003) The ethnography of communication. Oxford: Blackwell. (D7)
Schank, R. C., and Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: An
inquiry into human knowledge structures. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum
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Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist,
70, 1075-1095. (B5)
Schegloff, E. A, (1988). Goffman and the analysis of conversation. In P. Drew and T.
Wootton (Eds.) Erving Goffman: Exploring the interaction order. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 9-35 (C5) TM
Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation
analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Further reading)

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Schegloff , E. A. and Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 7, 289- 327. (D5)
Schiffrin, D. (1994). Approaches to discourse. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (Further reading)

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Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D. and Hamilton, H.E. (Eds.) (2004). The handbook of discourse
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Scollon, R. (1998). Mediated discourse as social interaction: A study of news discourse.
New York: Longman. (D8, Further reading)
Scollon, R. (1999). Mediated discourse and social interaction. Research on Language and
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Scollon, R. (2001). Mediated discourse: The nexus of practice. London: Routledge. (D8,
Further reading)
Scollon, R. (2007) Analyzing public discourse: Discourse analysis and the making of public
policy. London: Routledge. (Further reading)
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S.W. (2004). Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet.
New York: Routledge. (B8)
Scollon, R., Scollon, S. W. and Jones, R. H. (2011). Intercultural communication: A
discourse approach, 3rd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. (A6, B7)
Searle, J. (1966). Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Further reading)
Shuy, R. (1993). Language crimes: The use and abuse of language evidence in the
courtroom. Oxford: Blackwell. (C5)
Simpson, P. and Mayr, A. (2009). Language and power: A resource book for students.
Abingdon: Routledge. (Further reading)
Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance and collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(B10)
Stoddard, S. (1991) Text and texture: Patterns of cohesion. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. (Further
reading)
Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and corpus analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Swales, J. M. (1981). Aspects of article introductions. LSU Research Report. University of
Aston in Birmingham. (D3)
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A3, B3, D3)
Swales, J.M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (Further reading)
Talamo, A. and Ligorio, B. (2001) Strategic identities in cyberspace. Cyberpsychology and
Behavior 4 (1), 109-122. (Further reading)
Tannen, D. (Ed.) (1984) Coherence in spoken and written discourse. Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Publishing Corporation. (Further reading)
Tannen, D. (1993). Framing in discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. (Further
reading)
Tannen, D. (2004). Talking the dog: Framing pets as interactional resources in family
discourse. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 37(4), 399-420 (B6).
Tannen, D. (2005). Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. 2nd Edition.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.
Tannen, D. and Wallat, C. (1987). Interactive frames and knowledge schemas in
interaction: Examples from a medical examination/interview. Social Psychology
Quarterly 50(2), 205-16. (D6) TM
ten Have, P. (2007). Doing conversational analysis. 2 Edition. London: Sage. (Further
nd

reading).

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ter Wal, J. (2002). Racism and cultural diversity in the mass media. Vienna: European
Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relations.
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 speakers of other languages or dialects (pp. 6374), Washington, DC:
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from: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_of_the_two_sorries.
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Academic Press (Further reading)
van Dijk, T. (1987). Communicating racism: Ethnic prejudice in thought and talk. London:
Sage. (D10)
van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and context: A sociocognitive approach. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (A7)
van Leeuwen, T. (1999) Speech, music, sound. Basingstoke: MacMillan. (A9)
van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice New tools for critical discourse analysis.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Further reading)
van Leeuwen, T. (2011) The language of color: An introduction. London: Routledge. (A9)
Verschueren, J. (1999). Understanding pragmatics. London: Arnold. (Further reading)
von Humboldt, W. (1836). ber die Vershiedenhiet des menschlichen Sprachbaues und
ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlects. Royal
Academy of Sciences of Berlin. (Reprinted as Linguistic variability and intellectual
development (1971), translated by G. C. Buck and F. A. Raben. Miami, FL:
University of Miami Press.) (D7)
Vygotsky, L. S. (1981). The instrumental method in psychology. In J. V. Wertsch.
(Ed.) The concept of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 134143). Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe. (B8)
Walther, J. B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal
and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1), 3-43. (C6)
Watts, R. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Further
reading)
Wertsch, J. V. (1993). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(Further reading)
Wertsch, J.V. (1999). Mind as action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (D8)
Widdowson, H. G. (1973). An applied linguistic approach to discourse analysis.
(Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Department of Linguistics, University of
Edinburgh. (D1)
Widdowson, H G. (2007). Discourse analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. (B1,
Further reading)
Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (Eds.) (2001). Methods of critical discourse analysis. London:
Sage. (Further reading)

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 GLOSSARIAL INDEX



Act sequence (B7)
Actions (A8, B8, B9)
Frozen actions (B9)
Higher level actions (B9)
Lower level actions (B9)
Adjacency pair (B5)
Advice (C5)
Affordances (B8)
Ambiguity (A1)
Analytical images (B9)
Apologies (C5)
Assertion (C4)
Awareness (A2)

Blogs C3)

Classificatory images (B9)
Coherence (B1, A2)
Cohesion (B1, A2, B2, C2, D2)
Grammatical (B2)
Lexical (B2)
Ties (D2)
Collocation (B10)
Span (B10)
Common knowledge (A2)
Communicative competence (A7)
Communicative purpose (A3)
Computer mediated interactions (C6)
Concordance (B10)
Conditional relevance (A5)
Conjunction (B2)
Connectives (B2)
Additive (B2)
Causative (B2)
Contrastive (B2)
Sequential (B2)
Constituency (D2)
Constraints (B8) TM
Content words (B10)
Context (A7)
Contextualization cues (B6)

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Conversation analysis (A5)
Conversational strategies (A6)
Face strategies (see Face)

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 Framing strategies (see Framing)
Cooperative principle (B5)
Corpus (A10)
British National Corpus (A10)
Cleaning (B10)
Reference (see Reference corpus)
Tagging (B10)
Corpus-assisted discourse analysis (10)
Critical discourse analysis (B4)
Culture (A7)
Cultural models (B2, A4)

Discourse (A1, B1)
Discourse analysis (A1)
Discourse community (A3, B3, C3), D3)
Discourse marker (B6)
Discourse practices (B4)
Discourse prosody (B10)
Discourse representation (C4)
Discourses (A4, A8, A 10, B1, C1)
Discourses in place (B8)
Dispersion plots (Concordance plots) (B10)
Distributional analysis (B1)

Ellipses (B2)
Ethnographjy (A7)
Ethnography of speaking (communication) (A7)
Ethnomethodology (A5)

Face (A6)
Face strategies (A6)
Negative (A6)
Positive (A6)
Face systems (A6)
Deference (A6)
Hierarchical (A6)
Solidarity (A6)
Facebook (C1, C6)
Felicity conditions (B5)
Field (A7)
Force (B5)
Illocutionary (B5)
Locutionary (B5) TM
Perlocutionary (B5
Forensic linguistics (A10)

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Formal approach (B1)
Frameworks (A2)
Generic (B2)
Interpretive (B2, A6, B6)

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 Primary (A6, B6)
Framing (A6)
Framing strategies (A6)
Function words (B10)
Functional approach (B1)

Gaze (B9, C9)
Genre (A3, B3, C3, D3)
Chains (C3)
Constraints (A3)
Conventions (A3)
Ecologies (C3)
Move structure (A3)
Networks (C3)
Genre analysis (A3)
Gestures (A9, B9, C9)
Beat gestures (C9)
Deictic gestures (C9)
Iconic gestures (C9)
Metaphoric gestures (C9)
Grammar (A1)

Historical body (B8)

Ideology (A4, A8)
Implicature (B5)
Independence (A6)
Instrumentalities (B7)
Interaction order (B8)
Interactional sociolinguistics (A6)
Interactive frames (B6)
Intermodal relationships (B9, C9)
Intertextuality (A2, A4, C3, C4)
Involvement (A6)

Key (B7)
Keyness (B10)
Keyword analysis (B10)

Lexical chains (B2)
Lexicography (A1)

Markedness (B7) TM
Maxims (Gricean) (B5)
Manner (B5)

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Quality (B5)
Quantity (B5)
Relevance (B5)
Meaning (A2)

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Media (B3, B8)
Mediated action (A8)
Mediated discourse analysis (A8, B8, C8, D8)
Modality (A4, B4, B9)
Mode (A7)
Modes (of communication/semiotic) (A1, A9, B9)
Multimodal discourse analysis (A9, B9, C9, D9)
Multimodal interaction analysis (A9, B9, C9, D9)

Nomalinalization (B4)
Norms of interpretation (B7)
Narrative images (B9)

Object handling (C9)

Paraphrase (C4)
Participants (A4, B4, B7)
Performatives (B5)
Personal advertisements (B3)
Phonology (A1)
Pragmatics (A5)
Presuppositions (C4)
Processes (A4, B4)
Action (A4)
Mental (A4)
Relational (A4)
Verbal (A4)
Promises (C5)

Quotation (D4)

Register (A4, A7)
Reporting verbs (D4)
Reference (B2)
Anaphoric (B2)
Antecedent (B2)
Cataphoric (B2)
Coreferentiality (D2)
Definite article (B2)
Exophoric (B2)
Reference corpus (B10)
Resemiotization (A9) TM
Russian Formalists (B1)

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Schema (D2)
Semantic field (A2)
Semantic prosody (B10)
Sequentiality (A9, B5)

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 Setting (B7)
Simultaneity (A9)
Sites of engagement (B8)
Situated language (A1)
Social approach (B1)
Social identity (A1)
Social language (A4)
Social practices (A8, B4, B8)
SPEAKING (A7, B7)
Speech acts (B5)
Speech events (B7)
Speech situations (B7)
Speech vs. writing (A5)
Substitution (B2)
Systemic functional grammar (A9)

Tautology (C1)
Tenor (A7)
Text analysis (D1)
Texture (A2)
Loose (B2)
Tight (B2)
Threats (C5)
Type token ratio (B10)

Varieties of English (A10)

Warnings (C5)
Weblogs (see Blogs)
Whos doing whats (A4)
Word frequency lists (B10)

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 AUTHOR INDEX


Abelson, R. P. (B2)
Anthony, L. (B10)
Austin, J. L. (B1)

Baker, P. (A10)
Bakhtin, M. (A4)
Bateson, G. (C7, D8)
Bhatia, V.K. (A3)
Birch, D. (D4)
Bizzell, P. (D3)
Blood, R. (C3)
Burr, V. (D10)
Byram, M. (D7)

Chomsky, N. (D7)
Chouliaraki, L. (D8)
Coupland, J. (B3)

Danet, B. (C6)
Douglas, M. (D7)
Duranti, A. (D7)

Eggins, S. (B2)

Ferguson, C.A. (D6)
Fairclough, N. (D4, D8)
Fillmore, C. (D4)
Firth, J.R. (A7, B10)
Foucault, M. (B1)

Gee, J. P. (B1, D8)
Geertz, C. (D7)
Gaga, L. (B2, C2, C10)
Goffman, E. (A6, B6, D6)
Grice, P. (B1)
Gumperz, J. (A6)
Halliday, M. A. K. (A9, B1)
Hardt-Mautner, G. (A10)
Harris, Z. (B1) TM
Hasan, R. (B2)
Herring, S. (C6)
Hodge, R. (B4)

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Hoey, M. (B2)
Hofstadter, D. (D4)
Hogben, S. (B3)

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 Holland, D. (D4)
Holyoak, K. J. (D4)
Hunston, S. (D10)
Hymes, D. (A7, B7, D7)

Jakobson, R. (B7)
Jefferson, G. (A5)
Johnson, M. (D4)
Jones, R. (B3, B8)

Kiesler, S. (C6)
Kim, Y. Y. (D7)
Kress, G. (B4)
Kristiva, J. (D4)

Labov, W. (D1)
Ladegaard, H. J. (B6)
Lakoff, G. (D4)
Landow, G. P. (C6)
Law, I. (D10)
Lin, A.M.Y. (B6)
Liu, J. (D7)
Malinowski, B. (A7)
Martin, J. (A3)
McEnery, T. (D10)
McLuhan, M. (B8)
Milroy, L. (D7)
Murphey, T. (C10)

Nanda, S. (B3)

Ortega y Gasset, J. (D6)

Parker, I. (D10)
Philips, S.U. (D7)
Propp, V. (B1)

Quinn, N. (D4)

Reddy, M. (D4)
Refaie, E. (D10)
Reisigl, M. (D10)
Rey, J. M. (A10) TM
Ruesch, J. (C7)
Rumelhardt, D. (B2)

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Saville-Troike, M. (D7)

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 Schank, R. C. (B2)
Schegloff, E. (A5)
Scollon, R. (A6)
Scollon, S.W. (A6)
Searle, J. (A5)
Sinclair, J. (B10)

Tannen, D. (A6)
ter Wal, J. (A10)
Thagard, P. (D4)
Troike, R.C. (D7)

van Dijk, T. (A7, D10)
von Humboldt, W. (D7)
Vygotsky, L. (B8)

Wallat, C. (D6)
Walther, J. (C6)
Wertsch, J. V. (D8)
Widdowson, H.G. (B1)
Wittgenstein, L. (D6)
Wodak, R. (D10)

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